President of Seaport Securities and 38-year member of the NYSE
The most dramatic day I've ever spent on the trading floor without question was the crash of '87. It was unbelievable. The emotion and the tension and the scariness - you could feel it, touch it, taste it. I've never been in a situation anywhere else in any other time where I was in the midst of a pool of panic. It was as out of control as anything I've ever experienced, both on the trading floor and off. People were emotionally exhausted at the end of that day. With the benefit of a little hindsight, in this case a couple of hours of hindsight, a lot of smart people realized it was way overdone. But in a situation like that, people are pretty much saying, "I don't care, just sell it." The customers were panicked. I don't want to say everybody lost their cool, but they came as close as they could without allowing that to happen. You had to work at not losing it. The customers have the luxury of losing it, but the brokers don't.
What's so interesting about events like that is, you learn when it comes to buying and selling stocks that the ability of somebody to remove emotion from the decision-making process will translate directly into their ability to be successful. It's the person who can think clearly, who can move against the emotional grain, who ends up being the winner.
