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Frantic investors, including thousands in the Triad, lost more than their shirts Thursday.

“I think (they) have lost their heads,” said Jonathan Smith, managing partner of Greensboro’s Jonathan Smith & Co. Investment Counsel and a registered investment adviser. “Fear is as contagious as the flu.”

For the week so far, the Dow Jones industrial average is down more than 1,745 points. What has seemed like a bottom each day this week has given way to another sell-off.

Smith, who follows stock-market data like some follow baseball statistics, has charted the worst 100 trading days over the past 80 years. There have been 16 in the last 50 years. One came Thursday.

Banks and insurance companies took some of the most severe blows during the turbulent afternoon and the impact locally was significant.
Lincoln National, which bought Jefferson-Pilot Financial two years ago and has a major presence in Greensboro, saw its stock fall 34 percent, closing at $18.31.

Other results:

• BB&T stock fell more than 14 percent to $28.25.
• Wachovia was down almost 29 percent to close at $3.60.
• AIG, which owns Greensboro-based United Guaranty, fell 25 percent to $2.39.
• Bank of America fell 11 percent to close at $19.63.

But it wasn’t just financial companies taking the hit. Selling swept across all sectors.

VF Corp., with headquarters in Greensboro, saw its stock fall almost 9 percent to $57.76. And high-tech chip maker RF Micro Devices’ stock fell 9 percent to $2.03.

“This is like a snowball going downhill,” said Rooney Boone, a retired stockbroker from Greensboro. “It is just unbelievable how vicious and total this decline was today.”

As Boone talked, he studied a screen listing 56 stocks. All but two had declined for the day. “And they have been weak as water,” he said.

Boone said he saw trouble coming when the stock market failed to jump last week when Congress passed the $700 billion bailout package.

“When the market gets what it wants and it can’t respond to it positively, you know there is more downside,” he said. “That was a very bad sign.”

Financial planners said they spent the day hand-holding jittery investors.

“(I’ve been) reassuring people that their financial world is not spinning out of control,” said Linda P. Erickson of Erickson Advisors, a Greensboro wealth management firm. “It looks pretty bad, but this, too, shall pass.”

The market sell-off “is different this time, but human nature is not ever different,” Smith said. “We are reacting in the same way as if someone just dropped a slithering rattlesnake in the room with us. We just flee to safety. It is a primal reaction.”

Spooked by doomsday predictions on various financial television and Web sites, many average investors take action before they consider the consequences, Smith said.

So, what will happen today?

“Friday is usually a down day,” Erickson said. “I would expect this might be the same. These are confounding markets.”

Staff writer Lanita Withers contributed to this report.

Contact Richard M. Barron at 373-7371 or richard.barron@news-record.com

Contact Donald W. Patterson at 373-7027 or don.patterson@news-record.com