A Case of Nerves

If the nation met the crisis in Southeast Asia with considerable calm, the same could not be said of Wall Street. The Dow-Jones averages paused on Monday after the first North Vietnamese PT boat attack on U.S. ships, plunged 7 1/2-points Tuesday after news of the second attack, rallied on Wednes day for a fractional gain. Then on Thursday, as rumors spread of possible Red Chinese involvement, the market tumbled 9.65 points -- to 823.40 -- in the sharpest one-day break since President Kennedy's assassination. The week's total decline, after a 5 3/4-point rally at week's end: 12 points, to 829.16. It was Wall Street's classic way of ducking distant gunfire.

The little investor was doing much of the selling, and the tape ran late nine times during the week, once for 16 minutes. But there was no panic, and trading volume stayed extraordinarily low for most of the week. Professionals figured that, in any case, the market needed an excuse to retreat after a heady climb, guessed that there was a good deal of plain old profit taking. At the most bearish hour last week, Indicator Digest, an investment advisory service, issued a special bulletin: "Emotional war jitters have always culminated in good buying opportunities." True enough, but wary professionals were not entirely sure that the jitters were quite over.

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