Stocks fall 4%: Wall Street traders reacts to market plunge

It looks like some people might have viewed yesterday's rally as a good exit, and then it just started feeding on itself this morning. The market did need to pull back and re-calibrate for value, but the viciousness of the move is really the story of the day.
—— Frank Davis, senior managing director at LEK Securities.

When Powell said he wasn't going to tighten 75, that's what led to that relief rally. But they're still tightening, and they're still tightening at a more aggressive pace than most would have imagined just a short while ago. So it is difficult to buy into the rallies. Overall financial conditions are going to be tighter moving forward and certainly the risk of a recession, the risk of tighter financial conditions leading to a recession is still there. So it's very difficult to jump on any sort of rally under these conditions.
—— Chris Gaffney, president of world markets at TIAA Bank.

The scale of today's move is a little surprising. We had been viewing 4,200 as a support for the S&P 500, and we're below that now. Really, this seems like a knee-jerk reaction from yesterday, with some profit-taking. There could also be some portfolio managers out there recommending the buying of bonds and selling stocks, which could be contributing to the overall weakness.
—— Stephen Carl, head trader at Siebert Williams Shank & Co..

People have been looking for a capitulation, where everyone just throws in the down. Perhaps today is that day. This is the first day that I would describe as a capitulatory day. Even though some of these high-valuation, low-profitability names are down 60-70%, it doesn't seem like there is any appetite to buy the dip.
We all knew something like this was going to happen eventually. We've seen it before. We tried to warn the young traders, but they didn't want to hear it. But I think this will result in a better market, because you actually have to look for quality.
—— Randy Frederick, vice president of trading and derivatives for Charles Schwab & Co..

Investors are getting spooked by the combination of soaring unit labor costs and a significant drop in productivity. Those are some stagflationary-like readings. The reports this morning are all from 1Q. They haven't told us anything new, but investors are clearly extremely focused on inflation.
—— Cliff Hodge, chief investment officer at Cornerstone Wealth.

Usually you end up having a reversal move to digest whatever occurred the day before. There's a pop after a drop, and, in this case, there's usually a drop after a pop. On the one hand, it's because traders are looking to take profits because they questioned the sustainability of this advance.
—— Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA.

Chairman Powell was clear-ish -- I say clear-ish because he said soft-ish landing. But when he took the 75 basis points off the table, inherent in that was a suggestion that perhaps they wouldn't need it. Why would you say that if you thought, for example, inflationary pressures were going to climb even higher?
—— Quincy Krosby, chief equity strategist at LPL Financial.

Day after day, the direction seems to change. This opens up good opportunism for companies which have fundamentals, strong earnings, strong outlook for the next three-to-five years. What is really interesting about these markets is that there are these every-other-day changes in either direction where investors are outrageously bullish or outrageously bearish the next day.
—— Sylvia Jablonski, CEO, CIO and co-founder of Defiance ETFs.