There was a clerk on our floor in the seventies named Reggie.

Every time the evening paper ran a frightening front page, Reggie sold.

Didn't matter what he owned. Didn't matter the price. The headline said fear, so Reggie supplied it.

The old jobbers loved him. They set their watches by him.

You know a Reggie. Every office has one.

One of them told me — I was twenty-three, still learning where the tea trolley stopped — "Son, watch what the room does after Reggie sells."

Most days, the room did nothing at all.

The chip stocks had a Reggie day.

War in the headlines this time, and down they went — Nvidia three and a half percent, its neighbours worse.

The television called it a rout. Fear, panic, money running for the door.

I went looking for the running money. I keep a journal for such things — thirty-seven of them now.

Here is what the tape actually confessed.

Real panic is loud. When money truly runs, trading volume doubles, sometimes worse.

Nvidia traded about seventy percent of an ordinary day. The others sold off on the same thin tape.

That is not a stampede. That is a few Reggies selling the front page while the room stood still.

And the buyers? They did what patient money always does when a nervous man is selling.

They stepped back and let the price come to them.

You've done this at a car boot sale. Be honest — why bid against a man in a hurry?

Fear that arrives quietly tends to leave the same way.

Tomorrow's episode:

Nvidia closed at two hundred three and a half — right on the day's floor.

Overhead sits the old close, near two hundred eleven.

Watch which line the crowd tests first. The Reggies will be watching the headlines. We shall watch that.

Mind the extremes,

Wolfe

P.S. Reggie retired comfortably, by the way. On his salary. Not his trading.