... and the market reacts ...

5.56% of value wiped off the books. Right now we are at 10,523.07 on NYSE. 6.9% drop on NASDAQ. S&P; 500 is down 7.05% All this just today. Folks, this is about to get bumpy. 5% of market value just evaporated. Thats $50B of each $1T of market cap. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we are talking about real money.

Tech got whalloped. Our partners at Wipro had a 10% decline. Our friends at TCS lost 8.3%. Our friends at Sun, 9.82%. SGI and CSD.L had been whalloped already, so taking more out of their hides isn’t going to do much. Microsoft dropped 5.84%, Dell 7.29%. NVIDIA and AMD with large consumer exposure lost 13.4 and 17.05 % respectively. IBM got hit by 5.3%. The unfortunate part of this? It ain’t over.

That said, notice that Citigroup took over Wachovia today. WaMu was already absorbed by JP Morgan. The market is doing the right thing, and correcting. Distressed assets are being assigned a value and purchased. The market is fluctuating in total value, and is dissipating value. I believe it will eventually converge. I am hoping that ‘eventually’ is not measured in years. This will impact HPC purchases and the market as a whole. Companies will have to do more with less. This is, believe it or not, an opportunity for innovative companies. Companies depending upon customers spending a premium for their products are going to be in pain. Companies offering differentiated performance at reasonable prices ought to do well.