The stock market had been rallying hard for the past few days in anticipation of a Fed rate cut. Today, the markets got its cut and instantly stocks sold off. After starting the day strong, the ContentNext Media Index fell 1.71 percent, ending at 1062.78. Still, this was better than the performance at the major indexes, as the NASDAQ and S&P 500 fell by 2.45 percent and 2.53 percent respectively. Overall the ContentNextDex is up 6.2 percent since its Sept. 10 launch. Obviously, the slide had something to do with the rate cut (just based on the timing), but nobody can say for sure what happened. It could be an example of the old cliché about buying the rumor and selling the news (whatever that means), or it could be that the markets wanted more than a 25 basis point rate cut.

Within the index, no sector was spared, though no one sector took a disproportionate share of the damage. Notable losers included Google (NSDQ: GOOG) (-2.67), Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) (-2.90), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) (-1.90), NYTCO (-1.83) and News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) (-2.02). AT&T (NYSE: T) ended as one of the few solid gainers today, rising by 4.12 percent, although even that was off its highs. Shares of Sony (NYSE: SNE) fell slightly, after earlier trading up on comments from CEO Howard Stringer that the company was not seeing any negative effects from the economy.