after having one of the best years, wall street is struggling to find traction in 2014. yesterday the slide continued as the dow fell by more than 300 points. so far it s been the dow s worst year worst start to a year since 2011 and that year losing 1.2 trillion since january the 1st. cnbc s jeff cutmore is live in london. explain why we re seeing such a dramatic contraction. this is a real head scratcher for the mom and pop investor who s just going back into the markets after the strong year that we had in 2013. the problem is, we had a very weak u.s. manufacturing number for january. in fact, it was the biggest decline in the new order for 33 years. what that all boils down to is markets are nervous anyway over a selloff we ve seen in the emerging market space. now it appears that there is some stuttering in growth in the u.s. economy. that s got these man on the
probably months at this point while the fed figures out how to get the stimulus out. ultimately, it will shake out to a normalized level. the underlying economy is good so i d freak out a little bit, but ultimately just wait. we want to have the economy stand on its own two feet, but that s the thing here. 401(k) investors, they re not active traders, and the people trading here are probably booking profits from this huge run-up we ve had. yeah. what it is is a very professional market right now, and you ve got traders who love volatility, cashing in on this. we had a pretty tepid market for a while, wasn t a lot of daily motion, and then the fed said we re going to pull out stimulus and you ve got big swings up and down. we could pop back up today, so this is a professional trader s market, not for the amateur, mom-and-pop investor. best thing is to wait it out at this point. if you re risk averse and can t stomach all the swings, maybe take a little money off the table at this po