What did the Nasdaq's Wednesday dive really signal?

Halloween is still a couple of days away, but it seems no one told the market. A series of failed rallies and then Wednesday's nearly three percent shellacking of the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite ($COMPX) had a lot of folks pretty spooked.

All it took was for enterprise software titan SAP (SAP) to post some disappointing quarterly results (and chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to get its name dragged into the Galleon Group insider trading scandal), and suddenly tech stocks were wobbling like Weebles. Even the Four Horseman of the Nasdaq -- Amazon.com (AMZN), Google (GOOG), Apple (AAPL) and Research in Motion (RIMM) -- fell 0.4 percent to nearly 5 percent, respectively.