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Bay area traders choose to sit tight
By SCOTT BARANCIK
© St. Petersburg Times, Somebody was selling a lot of stock on Wall Street Monday, but Tampa Bay area investors insisted they held steady and stayed calm. All of the more than two dozen bay area residents interviewed Monday said they resisted the temptation to unload stocks or mutual funds. Some bought even more. Take SunTrust Bank employees Dave Kurella and Jack Robb. With five minutes to spare before the major stock exchanges reopened, the two sipped coffee and watched CNN at a cafe inside downtown Tampa's Hyatt Regency hotel. "I won't sell," Kurella said. He criticized so-called short sellers, investors who make money by betting that stock prices will plummet. "I'm hoping that everybody who's short on the market today gets kind of stung." Robb said he planned to buy communication stocks and technology issues such as EMC Corp., a Massachusetts company that makes data storage products. "If people are hesitant to travel," he said, "they're probably going to get back into doing business by phone or other technologies." Despite such sentiment, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell a record 684.81 points to close at 8,920.70, down 7.13 percent. The broader Standard & Poor's 500 Index held up better, as a 53.77 point decline took it down 4.92 percent to 1,038.77. The already battered Nasdaq Composite Index fell 6.83 percent, down 115.82 to 1,579.55. Much of the day's damage may have come from trading by institutional investors and money managers, while individuals sat on the sidelines or bought a few shares. Anthony Ross, a 37-year-old associate partner at consulting company Accenture in St. Petersburg, said he considered it his patriotic duty to cushion the market's fall. "I actually called my broker and said, "Look, just buy something,' " he said. "I'm not really thinking I'll make a profit from it at all." Leslie Banaszek was more nervous than most yet remained true to her sit-tight strategy. "I have a 401(k) through the city," said Banaszek, a 42-year-old clerk at the Dade City Police Department. "I hope they know what they are doing." Call it patience, pride, wisdom or even groupthink, the result of years of "buy-and-hold" advice from money managers and federal officials. Even the most casual bay area investors expected stock prices to fall sharply Monday, the first day of trading since last week's terrorist attacks, and few blinked when that happened. Most thought the market would recover, sooner or later. Few bothered to watch the ups and downs on television. A similar calm and resolve prevailed on the Nasdaq trading floor at St. Petersburg's Raymond James & Associates. After a moment of silence, the ringing of the opening bell brought cheers and a flurry of orders and confirmations. "You got 2,500 CACI at 47 and a half," a trader yelled. "You still want to sell MESA here?" Trading was busy, but not frantic. Chairman Thomas A. James surveyed the floor with coffee cup in hand. "In 1987, it was far more chaotic," he said, referring to Black Monday, an October day when stock prices plummeted 22 percent. "Back then, the traders had two phones to their ears and there was screaming across the floors all the time." One reason things were calmer Monday is that computers now process most of the orders from individual investors. Only the large orders -- mostly from money managers -- make it to the trading floor. Still, traders such as Judith Jones were somber. "I just found out another one of our dear friends died," Jones said. Two American flags decorated her desk, and a prayer was taped to her computer terminal. Though bay area investors were united in their stand against unloading stocks Monday, their reasons were less uniform. Brian Clayton, 33, saw an opportunity to bargain-hunt. Though he postponed any purchases until later this week, Clayton, executive chef at the University Club of Tampa, said AOL Time Warner was looking like a good buy. "AOL Time Warner, I mean, where's it going?" said Clayton, watching CNBC in his office an hour before the lunchtime rush. And he was even thinking of investing in a Nasdaq index fund, which mirrors the top 100 stocks on that exchange. Waiting for her car to be repaired at Lindell Honda in Tampa, Lara Bates said she and her boyfriend think defense industry stocks look promising. After all, said Bates, a 32-year-old former loan officer who recently moved to the bay area, the stock market always rights itself after a traumatic downturn, usually within several years. Tom O'Reilly, a 44-year-old vice president at a Tampa printing company, said there are some "great buys out there," including Microsoft, General Electric and Oracle. "A friend of mine yesterday thought the cell phone business was a good one to get into," he said between bites of a sandwich at Malio's restaurant, "because of all the publicity" about their use by those entangled in the disaster. "I agreed with him." But for some investors, the decision to hold steady was more a matter of heart than head. Clearwater developer Phil Henderson, 68, said he plans to let his mutual fund investments sit. "I have faith the American people won't panic and will hang in there," he said. "We'll all be better off for it." - Times staff writers Helen Huntley, J. Nealy-Brown, Brady Dennis and Deborah O'Neil contributed to this report. Scott Barancik can be reached at barancik@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8751.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
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From the Times Business report
From the AP
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