The market hits new lows, your 401 K money has died and gone to heaven, and you are in total
panic mode. Yes, Main Street, you are bewildered by the market's wild ride and you just called your broker and screamed in a high-pitched voice, "SELL EVERYTHING".
After watching your investments evaporate into thin air you are so traumatized by the market that you no longer look at your monthly statements-- "I can't stand to see how bad things are". You wake up in the middle of the night, clutching a pillow, and sweat it out saying to yourself, "I'm going to go broke". It's not sugar plums dancing in your 
anxious brain tonight. No, my fellow traumatized friend, it's the image of the market crashing to zero. It's the image of you standing on the street, selling apples so that you can buy a tuna-fish sandwich. It's the end of the world as we know it. The end of capitalism. The end of free market systems--the darkness before it turns totally black and the lights are turned out forever--if for no other reason than the sorry fact that you can't afford your utility bills.
You shudder. Recurrent thoughts intrude on you, like goblins that won't go back into the woodwork. You have a sense that if you turn your back on your computer screen and go back to take another look then half of what is remaining will have disappeared. Perhaps you calm yourself with a drink, smoke a cigarette after giving up smoking. Perhaps you turn to your partner or your pet and ask for reassurance. But you have been traumatized. You have a recurring sense that your financial life is ruined forever. It's happening again, NOW. There is no escape.
You have Post Traumatic Investor Disorder. Let's call it PTID.
Trauma on Wall Street. Blood in the streets. The end of the world.
OK. Your life isn't threatened-really. And, you haven't witnessed someone being axed to death. Things could be worse. But what solace is there in that if your financial future is wiped out? What tranquility can you ever regain if you keep having these images of your portfolio being hacked to pieces?
Your faith in the world has been shattered. Like someone who suffers a trauma, you have "shattered assumptions". You may no longer trust your broker, the banks, the politicians, or yourself. After all, blame everyone but realize that it was you who gave the brokers and the investment gurus permission. And now you blame yourself. "I will never be able to make a good decision again". PTID.
You think of yourself as an idiot. It doesn't help you to know that there are a hundred million other idiots out there. Or you feel like a victim: "Why me? I worked hard. I played by the rules". But no matter what you say it doesn't do any good. You are holding a bag of dust.
You have sold off everything. Go into cash. Take the piddling one percent plus from Treasuries and sit in the corner, teeth chattering, eyes tearing up, and say, "Never again". You will never go back to that poker table where the sharks beat you out. You are finished. "I've had enough". Your body shakes.
As the crowds rush out the door abandoning all of their investments to whatever buyer is willing to buy, there is blood on the floor. The corpses and ghosts of the former, weak-willed, scared and traumatized lie there. It is doomsday. The end.
But. But...... A day and a week and a month later, the vultures who prey off the road- kill of now dead investors, come in, pick their pockets, buy the stocks and build up on what is now for sale AT ANY PRICE. You have become carrion. And they feed off of you.
The "smart ones" turn out to be the cold blooded investors who think, "Panic is normal in gambling markets". The laughing jackal says, "When the rest fold, I move in, and I make my play." The green-visored, cold calculators know a bargain when they see one. They think, "I've been waiting for this disaster for years. I've been waiting to see blood on the floor. Waiting for capitulation. Waiting for the sell-off."
"My day has come."
As one predator kneels on the floor of the Stock Exchange he lifts up a stock certificate covered with blood. It is selling for a 75% markdown. He looks into the camera as the focus closes in on his bloody lips and we hear him say, "I love the smell of Napalm in the morning. It smells like victory".
