Stockbroker Bruce Alderman's client returned home from a trip just in time to watch the stock market shed the most points ever in a single day and to hear that his bank, Wachovia, was being acquired by Citigroup.
Yesterday morning, the client rang up his broker, telling the receptionist that the call was "urgent."
"I want to make sure I'm OK," the man told Alderman, president of Chapin Davis brokerage in North Baltimore.
Alderman looked up the man's account, telling him his portfolio was down about 1 percent after the market plunge. Not bad, Alderman said, given that the Dow Jones industrial average fell 7 percent Monday, or 778 points.
After more assurances that his money and bank accounts were safe, the man thanked Alderman "for calming me down a little bit."
This has been a trying time even for the most steadfast buy-and-hold investor. Brokers everywhere are doing more hand-holding than usual. Investors have seen the failure or fire sale of big-name investment firms and the stability of money market mutual funds shaken.
Washington Mutual recently became the largest U.S. bank failure ever. And Monday, Congress couldn't muster the votes for a $700 billion emergency bailout of Wall Street, sending stocks over a cliff, though markets staged a rally yesterday.
It's the kind of climate in which long-time brokers start making comparisons to the Black Monday of 1987, the 1973-1974 bear market and, yes, the crash of 1929.
Investors are clearly concerned. Whether it's worries about their retirement accounts, mutual fund investments or the safety of their savings, many more customers are calling their investment advisers for guidance or just some reassurance.
At Chapin Davis, the event that triggered the most calls from clients occurred two weeks ago, when the nation's oldest money-market mutual fund announced that investors would lose some of their principal, something that's not supposed to happen. Investors across the country pulled billions from money market funds, fearing they could face similar losses. More than 200 calls came in to Chapin Davis the day after that announcement.
"They were more concerned about that recently because that was safe money," Alderman said. Clients told him, "You have been telling me to move to cash because things are rough out there. And now it's in cash. How safe is that?"
