Despite outward appearances, I was actually deep in thought about the events of Black Monday, the crash of 1987. I had spent the last twelve hours going over the pandemonium as it related to my own accounts and realized, just before I put my face to the carpet, that there was a good chance I would lose three times our net worth when the opening bell rang again five hours hence. The Securities and Exchange Commission counts roughly three hundred day-trading offices around the country that together serve thousands of clients. These new firms crow that cheap computers and the Internet give the rest of us the same kind of technology and intelligence that the big boys have. They make big market plays easy by lending you up to ten times the amount of money in your account and by charging extremely low commissions.
Some firms are more or less reputable.
Others come on like pimps at a bus station. All the stuff I'd need to trade. By some miracle that I still don't understand, I made a heap of money that day. What I do know is that the panic of Black Monday and its immediate aftermath were caused by investors who had given little advance consideration to how they might react if stocks happened to crash. Those least prepared bailed out.