Making money in the stock market the past few years has often seemed easier than a gut Core class for many Harvard investors. But the curve just rose a little higher last Friday.

Michael T. Coscetta '03 was enjoying a weekend in upstate New York away from the work and pressures of Harvard when he realized that he did have something to worry about.

"I was playing softball," he says. "My friend called me inside, and he says, 'Mike, you have to take a look at this.' I thought he was going to show me a picture of a naked woman."

"He points to the TV, and I see the stocks flying by. I punched him, started swinging, threw him onto the bed and started yelling at him for a while. He brought me in from my softball game to show me [I was] losing thousands of dollars," he says.

During the last two weeks, the stock market has made investors across the country more than a little queasy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 618 points last Friday, its biggest-ever drop. The NASDAQ, which includes many of the highest-flying technology firms, lost a quarter of its value last week.

While both indexes have risen healthily since Friday, the wild ride has left some Harvard investors with big losses.

Coscetta says he was not hit especially badly because many of the stocks he owned escaped the brunt of the fall. But his riskiest stocks went down--a lot.

His losses on Friday were about $9,000, just under 10 percent of his portfolio, he says.