Nobody could disagree. But the extreme fear that was in evidence did not guarantee that stocks had hit a bottom. Mr Buffett acknowledged as much in his column for The New York Times and advised investors not even to try to time the market. His point was that stocks were cheap, so people should not take the risk of waiting.

"I haven't the faintest idea as to whether stocks will be higher or lower a month - or a year - from now," he wrote. "What is likely, however, is that the market will move higher, perhaps substantially so, well before either sentiment or the economy turns up. So if you wait for the robins, spring will be over."

But is there a way of telling when equities might have hit bottom? Certainly, when fear overcomes greed to this extent, attempts to assess a stock's value according to fundamental measures go out of the window. Instead, all people have to go on is history. Yet precedents as extreme as last month's "Black October" are few. Only four periods in the past 100 years (two of them during the 1930s) match the 46 per cent slide since the Standard & Poor's 500, the world's most widely tracked index, reached an all-time high in October last year.