BOSTON (Reuters) - General Electric Co's shares fell more than 15 percent on Wednesday, trading below $6 for the first time since 1991, as investors' anxiety about its hefty GE Capital arm continued to swirl.
"People are playing the $2.50 options on this thing pretty heavily," Peter Sorrentino, senior vice president and portfolio manager at Huntington Asset Advisors in Cincinnati, which holds GE shares, said, referring to bets that the U.S. conglomerate's stock could fall to that level.
"This looks like the same kind of bear rush that the financials got last summer. There's blood in the water and they're going to keep pounding away on this name."
GE shares were down about 78 cents, or 11 percent, at $6.23 on the New York Stock Exchange in morning trading, after touching a low of $5.87 early in the session.
They have lost roughly 79 percent of their value over the past year, a steeper drop than the 45 percent slide of the Dow Jones industrial average <.DJI>, or the 47 percent tumble of the Standard & Poor's 500 index <.SPX>.
(Reporting by Scott Malone, editing by Maureen Bavdek)
