LONDON -- "Capitulation bottom" is the ugly and inelegant phrase used by financial analysts in London to indicate the low point in the cycle of investor optimism and pessimism -- the point where investors give up in despair, sell their shrunken shareholdings, if they can find a buyer, and start putting what money they have left under the bed.
Such a point may have been reached long ago in the eternally sliding Tokyo stock market, but it is a new and unpleasant experience on Europe's bourses, especially on the London stock exchange, where stocks and shares throughout the 1990s soared ever upward.
Today there is plenty to despair about. Rafts of corporations have joined what is grimly known as the "90 percent club" -- companies whose share prices have fallen by at least 90 percent from their peak in London in 2000.