"On days like this, the financial consultants are spending most of the day calling their clients, letting them know what's going on and telling them we're investing for the long term," William Lempe, Merrill Lynch resident vice president, said yesterday.
"The average guy in the street is invested for the long term," he said, and has only a small percentage of his investment to shift around day to day, Lempe said.
Investors really don't have much to worry about because the long-trend is for higher prices, he said.
"I really think the key is that this bull market, from the beginning of 1982, had that characteristic of long upward moves followed by volatile short-term down moves that lasted days and weeks. It's not like a bear market where you had months and months of downward moves," Lempe said.
"Our clients have been sitting round waiting for a decline to buy more stock."
Ted Jung, managing director of the Smith Barney Honolulu office, said it wasn't surprising that the phones got busy, particularly around 7:30 yesterday morning, when the Dow Jones industrial average had fallen more than 300 points in a day and a half and hadn't started to recover.
The Nasdaq stock market was even more active and its index fell some 20 percent before starting back up, Jung said.
It's natural that people would worry, but they shouldn't panic, he said.
"My advice would be, if you own good quality stocks - stocks that have good solid earnings - you should buy more, even, maybe not now but in a few weeks or months."
People who probably have reason to worry, Jung said, are those who invested on the basis of rumors that certain companies were about to take off, such as those involved in the Internet. Some of those companies are now reporting negative earnings, he said.
"I would be very, very nervous," he said.
Hawaii-connected stocks were mostly unaffected by the volatility of the last two days.
Most were down yesterday, but only by a fraction, and they were generally up a fraction today on Wall Street. Analysts say Hawaii's economy was so sluggish that island stocks were already down and didn't experience the run-up that preceded Monday's 161-point fall.
"The local stocks have done about what the economy has done and that's kind of not a helluva lot," Jung said.