It was a brutal day on the market yesterday with losing stocks outnumbering winners 14:1. Gold and silver stocks were among the biggest losers without a single metals stock on the NYSE, AMEX or NASDAQ posting gains.

Hecla, though, stands out as one of the biggest losers after tumbling 59 cents per share or 11.5 percent. That fall slashed the company’s market cap by more than $100 million in a single day of trading. Speculators, it appears, ran for the hills after hearing unemployment claims bumped up for the fourth time in five weeks.

480,000 people sought jobless benefits last week, and that means today’s unemployment numbers for January aren’t going to be good. Indeed, economists are calling for a 10.1 percent unemployment rate. Not good.

Why did Hecla get crushed?

In January, Hecla Mining Company’s (NYSE:HL) execs decided to sell some $2.5 million in stock. That was enough for me to jump ship. They’re all about the money. If they thought the stock was going to keep climbing in the short-run, they wouldn’t have sold (even if the shares were a tax liability as they claimed).

Taxes are a witch, of course, and it’s understandable that they wanted to avoid them. Still, the reasons why the execs had a lot of shares in the first place is even more troubling: Hecla had to defer their salaries in the form of restricted shares.

This all comes after to eyes-are-bigger-than-my-belly acquisition of the Greens Creek mine from Rio Tinto PLC (NYSE:RTP). In the wake of that buy, Hecla was forced into a series of equity offerings after the market tanked in 2008. They’ve been paying for it ever since.

I’ve been watching shares in Discover Financial Services (NYSE:DFS) get crushed for the past week. Trading at the absurd p/e of 5.5, its been the victim of pessimism over plastic, an earnings report that comes late in the season and general trading malaise.

Just about everyone seems to think credit card companies are next in line for a crisis, but that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone’s right. Take the case of Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F), for instance. If you’d told me a year ago that they’d be trading at 4-1/2-year high, I’d say you were loony.

But, of course, that just means I missed out on a 494 percent surge in stock price over the past 12 months. See, when pessimism’s at its worst, it’s the time to buy, and right now, there are few other sectors besides credit card lending where pessimism’s still at high levels (real estate comes to mind and little else).

We’ll get a good barometer on credit card companies this week with the release of earnings from MasterCard (NYSE: MA) and Visa (NYSE: V). The two giant moons orbiting wallets across the country, the companies make their money off transaction fees. And just because people aren’t buying as much doesn’t mean they aren’t still paying fees.

As the world moves closer to a cashless society, Mastercard and Visa are perfectly poised to capitalize on the trend. And while they get all the attention, gems like Discover go unnoticed.

Discover Financial Services will report their earnings on March 18, 2010, before the market open.