Wall Street suffered one of its worst days of the year yesterday, taking down with it shares of many stocks with Hawai'i ties.

However, the reaction among investors seemed muted.

"I think people took it in stride," said Andrew Glatzel, a financial adviser with Edward Jones in Kaimuki. But "I don't think anybody ever gets used to this kind of volatility. As a financial adviser, all you can do is make sure your clients have the proper expectations and are properly diversified."

The Dow Jones industrial closed down 311 points after earlier skidding nearly 450.

Glatzel said he received a few calls from clients concerned about yesterday's sharp drop and pre-emptively called others. Stocks plunged as investors succumbed to months of worry about the mortgage and corporate lending markets.

Hawaiian Holdings, which owns Hawaiian Air, fell 20 cents, or 6 percent, to close at $3.13 a share. Shares of solar-power company Hoku Scientific, which was downgraded by an analyst a day earlier, fell 49 cents, or 5 percent, to close at $8.90 a share.

And Alexander & Baldwin, which posted an increase in second-quarter profit yesterday, was off $2.02, or nearly 4 percent, to close at $53.26.

The news wasn't all bad for share prices though.

Shares of Central Pacific Financial Corp. rose 30 cents, or 1 percent, to close at $30.05. The company, which had been trading near 33-month lows, on Wednesday announced it may repurchase up to 1.5 million of its shares and was increasing its quarterly dividend. Central Pacific also yesterday reported higher second-quarter profits.

Before yesterday's big drop, the Dow had been up nearly 11 percent for the year — and that margin has now been cut to about 8 percent. The S&P 500 was up 7 percent, and the market decline now puts it at a year-to-date gain of 4.5 percent; the Nasdaq's nearly 10 percent increase has been cut to less than 8 percent.

Investors who had been able for months to largely shrug off discomfort about subprime mortgage problems and a more difficult environment for corporate borrowing finally decided it was time to sell after the Commerce Department issued another disappointing home sales report.

Feeding the plunge were concerns that higher corporate borrowing costs will curb the rapid pace of takeovers that had driven stocks higher this year. Investors also feared the sluggish environment for home sales and continued defaults in subprime loans would spur debt defaults and weigh on corporate earnings.

Yesterday's trading was the latest and most extreme in a series of frenetic sessions over the past month — many also accompanied by triple-digit swings in the Dow — as investors sold on worries about the subprime fallout or bought on optimism that there wouldn't be any widespread problems caused by mortgage failures. Many analysts have described the back-and-forth trading as overwrought and based more on gut emotion than careful consideration of market and economic fundamentals.

That was the feeling again yesterday.

"Worries that have been out there for the past couple of years are coming to a head right now," said investment strategist Edward Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research Inc. in New York. "It's show time."