Oct. 8--Spirits were surprisingly high as the Stock and Bond Club of South Florida, a social group for brokers and financial advisors, gathered for cocktails on Monday night.

The Dow had fallen 370 points after having been down 800 earlier in the day. The government's $700 billion bailout had failed to assuage nervous investors. European markets had tumbled. The Dutch government had seized Fortis.

But as 80 or so members of the club convened at the Deer Creek Country Club in Deerfield Beach, the mood was ebullient -- save for a couple pragmatic naysayers.

Gary Wohrle, the club's president and a senior investment consultant with Regal Securities in Aventura, said the market's woes didn't concern him. "I'm very optimistic," he said. "I think we're going to have a rally of better than 1,000 points over the next week. Investors ought to hold onto their stocks."

Wohrle's prediction didn't look too sage on Tuesday, as the Dow lost another 508 points, while the NASDAQ was down 5.8 percent.

A lively Brit named Geoffrey Payne nursed a drink and tried to understand the day in context. "We went down today, a Monday, and we went down last Monday," said Payne, a financial advisor with Charlton Capital in Pompano Beach. "But we should be up tomorrow. We were up after last Monday."

Indeed, after the Dow fell 778 on the first day of trading last week, it recovered the next day, soaring 485 points. But this Tuesday the picture wasn't so rosy as markets seesawed throughout the day and then plummeted in a late session sell-off.

Richard Lilly, a private money manager in Boca Raton and former director of research at Raymond James, moped about the day's losses.

"It was much worse than I ever expected. This was almost as bad as the market crash of 1987," he said, referring to Oct. 19, 1987, when world stock markets crashed.

"There just is not enough capital flowing through the system," Lilly said. "That means this recession is going to be deeper and larger than otherwise thought."

The club dinner was sponsored by Enerplus Resources, a Canadian oil and gas producer whose stock tanked on Monday. Shares of Enerplus, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, ended Monday down 10.6 percent, and were off another 6.3 percent on Tuesday.

No matter. Jo-Anne Caza, vice president of investor relations for Enerplus, told those assembled on Monday that this is the time to invest. "Times like this make for buying opportunities," she said. And indeed, Enerplus has been a good bet since it was listed on the NYSE in 2001. An investor who bought $15,000 of the stock at its offering and held it would have received $22,000 in dividends over the last seven years with shares that have doubled in value.

After espousing the benefits of Enerplus, Caza displayed a PowerPoint that listed the company's market capitalization at $6.4 billion. "We prepared that last week," she said. "It's more like $5 billion today."

During a group prayer before dinner, club members asked the "Heavenly Father" to allow "that we would be the brokers you want us to be." The group then dined on beef and baby carrots.

Maria Wagner, 71, a broker with Boca Raton-based Mutual Service Corp. and a member of the Stock and Bond Club since 1981, said she's seen worse. "We've had meetings during hurricanes and we met on 9/11," she said. "This is calm by comparison."

Wagner, an immigrant from Germany, said she had faith in the U.S. economy. "I believe in the capitalistic system," she said. "It's being reinvented right now. It feels like a casino. But it will return to order. It will stabilize."

Among the few pessimists in the room was Arthur Lenowitz, a private trader from Boynton Beach. "This is just the beginning of the worst economic times this country has ever seen, and unfortunately there's not much to solve the problem," he said.

"I've seen very good times, and I've seen bad ones, like in 1987," Lenowitz said, also referring to Black Monday. "But compared to this, that was nothing."

While Monday wasn't as bad as 1987, the comparison is not far off. On Black Monday, the Dow fell 22.6 percent. Since stocks began their latest slide this summer, the Dow has fallen 27.6 percent.

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