That was not a panic.

Even with Eurozone stocks shedding nearly 4%, with the S&P 500 (^GSPC) suffering its biggest daily loss in 14 months, with all 10 S&P industry sectors down and with more than 93% of all trading volume in declining stocks – Monday’s market action did not qualify as a chaotic, indiscriminate selling purge.

That’s both good and bad.

The lack of a truly unhinged rush out of stocks and riskier bonds is reassuring on one level. It at least suggests that the upended Greek bailout process and nasty downturn in Chinese stocks aren’t seen as having an immediate viral chain reaction across global finance.

Yet traders who look for good odds of playing a rebound often prefer to see a more disorderly selloff driven by rash emotions and raw fear. We didn’t get that on Monday – and probably shouldn’t have expected to, given how near stock indexes are to recent highs and how steady credit markets had been.

Not that there wasn’t plenty in Monday’s action to elicit concern from investors. The morning bounce in stock futures appears to have been a bit of premature dip-buying by itchy investors wanting to bet against financial contagion.

Yet starting in the morning it became a steady, orderly retreat from stocks, the one-day chart of the S&P 500 describing a neat slant lower until it closed at its low for the session.

The Greek situation only became more noisy and hard to handicap. Prices of junk bonds sagged even as Treasury yields declined – a classic “risk-off” move. And the CBOE S&P 500 Volatility Index (^VIX) surged to a five-month high from around a six-month low, showing an aggressive push by traders to hedge and bet on further downside.

Veteran traders point to a Wall Street rule of thumb that says an overnight low in stock futures often needs to be revisited before the tape can gather itself and move on. That happened by the end of trading on Monday.

The same guild of traders will tell you that after a nasty one-day drop, it’s preferable to see further weakness the next morning rather than the tentative bounce that greeted investors Tuesday morning.

We’ll see if this “rule” holds up. While it’s often desirable to get a washout spilling into a couple of days, things don’t always go according to script and this market has been stingy with offering fat pitches for contrarians.

A key source of weakness in the selloff, as hinted here yesterday, was big bank stocks, which dropped more than 2.5%. This seemed to show that the banks were mostly rallying fpr months on rising long-term bond yields and anticipation of a Fed rate hike alone.