I expected today was going to be pretty choppy, ... We were again seeing a real conflict within the tech sector between people who believe values are low enough to buy and people still concerned about (possible) announcements of slowing growth, that the economy was coming in for a hard landing and nothing but bad news would be coming out.

Once again we have Nortel and BCE as the responsible parties for the major move in the market and everything else would probably be flat without them,

I think the rest of it was probably just the general feeling that techs had run toward the end of August and people were again beginning to get a little nervous about what was going on,

People sell on fear and when they have a chance to look at the fundamentals, begin to think again about whether the fear they had really made sense and buy back in.

After several days being increasingly optimistic, particularly in the chip sector, investors are now pulling back somewhat wondering if they have again jumped the gun. This kind of erratic move is typical when sentiment is shifting negative to positive.