Panic selling is a wide-scale selling of an investment which causes a sharp decline in prices. Specifically, an investor wants to get out of an investment with little regard of the price obtained. The selling activity is problematic because the investor is selling in reaction to emotion and fear, rather than evaluating the fundamentals. Most major stock exchanges use trading curbs to throttle panic selling, providing a cooling period for people to digest information related to the selling and restore some degree of normalcy to the market.