There's a phrase among stock traders:  "to catch a falling knife".  This refers 
to buying a stock while it is still falling, in the hopes that one is buying at 
or close to the bottom and will benefit from the entirity of the subsequent 
recovery.  As the phrase implies, it's a dangerous thing to do, as more often 
the stock continues falling.  It's generally considered safer to wait until the 
stock has bottomed and started recovering before buying.

Of course, if no one ever tries to catch a falling knife, then once a stock 
starts declining it will go all the way to zero.  This points up the critical 
role knife catchers play in the stock market:  they are the ones who keep stock 
market slides from becoming stock market crashes, by stepping in to buy while 
the market is still declining.

That's why the exchanges' plans to cancel orders that went through today at 
particularly low prices is a bad idea.  Days when knife catchers catch the hilt 
instead of being sliced by the blade are rare enough already.  Usually the knife 
catchers' assets continue to decline - and cancelling their profits when they do 
make money just discourages them further.  That could mean they won't be there 
to buffer the next crash - and that next crash could well have happened today 
without them

Image showing how the popularly reported 'precipitous drop' today was just 
the culmination of hours of continuous deterioration:

     

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