STOCK TUMBLE MAY SCARE RETIREES OUT OR MARKET
Many Florida investors are old enough to
have seen it all before -- they lived through the Crash of '29
and Monday's stock market debacle was just another day for
some.
    "I don't sell," declared one elderly investor, who said he
had more than one mln dlrs in stocks. "Whatever goes down is
bound to come back up."
    The uniqueness of south Florida investors was easy to see
in brokerage offices around Miami, where the average age of the
crowds watching the Big Board quotations flash by on Tuesday
was retirement and beyond.
   
    "I don't know of any demographic studies, but we certainly
have the highest number of elderly active investors," said
Marshall Moore, a vice president of AmeriFirst Securities
Corporation in Miami.
    He worries that Monday's record loss of more than 500
points on the New York Stock Exchange will scare many people,
particularly those on fixed incomes, out of the market forever.
    "They will not be in stocks any longer," he said. "When you
start getting heart palpitations and sweaty palms you have to
get out and stay out except for maybe utilities and some
income-oriented issues."
   
    Across the state on the Gulf coast where there are heavy
concentrations of retired persons, Robert Lee of Investment
Management and Research Incorporated said there were "a lot of
serious losses out there."
    Retirees account for 90 per cent of his firm's business and
could take comfort in the fact that its professional managers
took their money out of the market last month. "But for those
who were buying in on the recent  upswing, this is devastating,"
he said.
   
    Miami Beach broker George Fox, most of whose clients are
over 60, worries that many are not taking the situation
seriously enough. Those who depend on their market earnings
should be a lot more concerned, he said. "I am scared because I
think this could become very serious."
    One 93-year-old investor said the market was bound to fall
sharply, "I just didn't think it would happen so soon." She
remembered '29 and said she remained stingy to this day as a
result. "I still find it hard to spend money."
 Reuter
