Alan Ackerman Drop Quotations

With a market as nasty and negative as it is at the moment, there's little room for error. The Nasdaq has contracted very sharply in a short period of time. Its drop in a year is approximately 60 percent, but this is not representative of all companies that are publicly traded.

I think that the wide swings in the market created a lot of pain. We have a lot of walking wounded among portfolio holders. And many institutional types decided to purge problem stocks from their portfolios as a result of the drop we saw earlier in the week. We're really in a week this week that could go in either direction, and again those four variables, the four E's, could affect that.

The economic backdrop in the U.S. is still attractive, prompting bargain hunters to go to work as we approach year-end.