Black Tuesday: $104b wiped off share index

The Australian sharemarket crashed to its biggest one-day fall in more than 18 years yesterday as more than $104 billion was wiped out after panic selling gripped investors.
Mounting fears of a US recession sparked a contagion that spread from Europe to Asia, causing the local market to tumble for a 12th straight trading day.
About $300 billion has been lost from Australian shares since the market peak on November 1.
The crash officially tips the Australian exchange into a bear market - defined as a fall of 20 per cent - after almost five years of double-digit growth. Investors rushed for the exit from the opening bell yesterday morning and the stampede only grew as the day wore on.
The benchmark ASX200 index plunged more than 7 per cent, or 393.6 points, to 5186.8, while the broader All Ordinaries dropped 408.9 points to 5222 - the longest run of losses since January 1982, when the market fell for 13 consecutive days.
"Fear has taken hold … people seem convinced the world is ending," Colonial First State's head of investment markets research, Hans Kunnen, said yesterday.
"The dog is chasing its own tail and we don't know how to stop it."
Yesterday's meltdown on the Australian bourse was the fourth biggest sell-off in Australian history but was still dwarfed by Black Tuesday in October 1987, when a quarter of the market's value evaporated in a single day.
The global meltdown has wiped almost 11 per cent from the value of the most popular "balanced" Australian superannuation investments, taking away all of the gains last year and eating into a quarter of the earnings in 2006.
"In 2½ weeks, the whole of 2007 has been wiped out. The financial year-to-date figures are looking very red indeed," said the managing director of SuperRatings, Jeff Bresnahan.
Markets will need a strong turnaround before June for super funds to break even. Most funds expect to book a loss every six years and "it's increasingly likely this could be one of those", Mr Bresnahan said.
Last night the meltdown showed no sign of halting after European markets plunged in early trading. Germany's stockmarket slumped almost 4 per cent and Britain's FTSE index almost 2 per cent. Late yesterday US investors were also anticipating a fall of more than 4 per cent on Wall Street overnight, which is expected to lead to another sell-off on the Australian bourse today.
Market strategists say the negative sentiment will only be halted if the US central bank cuts interest rates by 75 basis points next week or large US companies show an improvement in earnings. Many strategists believe the American economy is already in recession.

The legendary US billionaire George Soros further stoked investors' fears after he said the world was facing the worst financial crisis since World War II. "The situation is much more serious than any other financial crisis since," Mr Soros told an Austrian newspaper.
Yesterday the number of trades on the Australian Securities Exchange reached a record of 666,720 as large numbers of retail investors decided to sell out of the stockmarket. The high number of retail investors was also shown by CommSec reaching a record of 123,000 trades, despite the high demand causing a 25-minute system outage.
As share prices kept falling, day traders expressed alarm about margin calls they were receiving from banks about loans they have taken to buy stocks. "The darkest day in my two-year tenure on the ASX. Thirty-two per cent of my profits wiped in two days and maybe more to come," said a day trader named "Vayama" on the market chatroom Top$tocks.com.au yesterday.
The widespread sharemarket falls have come at the same time as property investors have been concerned about rising interest rates and high levels of debt in property investment vehicles.
The average home owner has also been hit by higher interest rates on mortgages as banks raise rates to offset a higher cost of funding as a direct result of the global financial turmoil.
More than $US5 trillion ($5.7 trillion) has been wiped from global sharemarket so far this year amid fears that the subprime mortgage crisis in the US has pushed the world's largest economy into recession. A $US150 billion economic plan from the US President, George Bush, has failed to allay concerns of a slowdown.
The Australian market fared better than some of Asia's main bourses yesterday, with Hong Kong's Hang Seng index plunging 8 per cent. Japan's Nikkei fell 6 per cent while the New Zealand market dropped more than 1 per cent on its 14th straight day of falls.
"The fundamental concern is about US recession, but it's leading to a rush of the exits by investors," said AMP's head of investment strategy, Shane Oliver. "A lot of the selling is indiscriminate."