And me. At the moment I have concluded that there is no point in trying to respond to the current market in the short term: it just seems chaotic. The indexes so far today seem to have given back about 50% of yesterday’s insane jump.
So I am sitting on the sidelines in the hopes that things will stabilize in a while.
Though of course with a lunatic at the helm, that may be wishful thinking.
I’m also sitting on the sidelines, in that I haven’t changed my position (mostly invested in a target date index fund).
Sure, I’m not going to starve or anything. A huge loss of most of the portfolio It might put off the idea of buying a house, but I could survive the loss of the whole portfolio if I had to.
That said, it took the biggest dump and pump market manipulation of all time to create that swing, and it has mostly corrected itself the next day. It’s not as risky as it seems from the extremes of the last few days.
I can afford to do so without sleeping too badly at night because I have spent the last few years moving a substantial percentage of our assets to more conservative instruments, chiefly money market accounts. I’d been saying for some time that I couldn’t see how the overall market would sustain the rate of increase indefinitely. So I’d been expecting a correction; though I had no idea what form it would take…
I guess you’re still working and earning? Makes a difference to the perspective…
My wife & I are retired, so we don’t have so much in the way of time or opportunities to make up significant losses. Though I guess as a very experienced software engineer, I could get back in the saddle if I really had to, and code rings round all these young whippersnappers… 
Rather spend time in my home recording studio working on new songs, though.
I put half of my holdings into a Money Market Fund, 4.17%, which may go up (as the dollar goes down, sigh). The Euro ones I examined were less than half that rate note.
That is the problem. There are no safe havens anymore, no investment is sure to beat inflation on the middle run (and in the long run we are all dead). And even 4.17% may not be enough: it wasn’t the last years.
What are the alternatives to a Money Market Fund if that is not enough? Shares, individually hand-picket corporate bonds, gold/silver, commodities? Short term gambling, puts and calls? Unhealthy levels of adrenaline. Both for an individual investor and for the economy as a whole.
And it is true that the economy has had an underswelling of crisis modus for some time (acutely so since the 2008 crisis in my subjective perspective, YMMV), but I know who I blame for turning this into a supervolcano of Yellowstone-ish proportions in full eruption.
I can take a financial beating to quite a degree and come through, but to lose money because of other people’s stupidity without having a fair chance to prevent it despite seeing the problem (and I did, but I did not react consequently enough with hindsight, and I still don’t know how to act from here) angers me.
That one single moron can trigger misery for billions of innocents is surely a sign our governmental arrangements need a thorough rethink.
Mind my asking? How old are you? Do you have separate retirement accounts? Do you have kids?
There is more depth to the question than whether or not you can pay your monthly bills so long as you have your job.
I’m really just trying to understand the mindset of those who make the sort of bets you are making. (And you may do very well with these bets yet.) Even for very defined periods of time.
You are not unique but I suspect you are least unusual within the crowd that posts here.
I suspect his voter base skews pretty strongly towards people with little or no savings and no investment in the stock market, so they are thinking: this doesn’t affect me.
Of course the leopard is still likely to eat their faces in the form of higher prices, but they probably don’t realize that yet…
Saw this article today.
Of course what is “buying the dip” vs “catching a falling knife” (spoiler, bad idea) is only apparent looking backwards.
Yeah I suspect the latter applies more than the former.
Gaslighting works and Trump’s good at it.
So until very recently, I usually checked my investments daily or mostly so. But for the last month or so I quit doing that. Today I decided to check and found out that I could not get a quote on a stock I own. Turns out that the company was bought out and merged by another company, and I received cash for my shares. It was a small amount and I will have a $500 loss to offset income, but damn I feel silly for being completely unaware of the situation.
Why feel silly? They send out monthly statements. Clearly they think you learning about something you can neither control nor influence up to 30 days post-facto is good enough.
Checking investments daily (hourly??!?) is one of those silly OCD-isms enabled by the internet & mobile phones.
Now if you had been paying attention to the corporate machinations of all your holdings, you’d have known about this impending possible sale months ago. And could have sold in response to either the rumor or the news. And if you’re suggesting yo u feel silly about that, well, I sorta agree with you.
If one is to own individual company shares, one picks up the responsibility to closely monitor that company’s actions and health. Or be blindsided by news you could have used.
Early forties, no kids, no one depends on me. I also have a modest fixed income from a pension which I could live off of if I had to so even if I go broke with the the market I’ll be okay if not great. I’m very comfortable with making what seems like a good bet and living with the results. I don’t plan on gambling with the market like this on a regular basis I just feel like right now is a critical time of opportunity and I’ve decided to pursue it the way I’ve been describing the thread. There’s also another factor which is that I’m currently going back to grad school and I don’t know if I’m going to continue it or if I’m just going to like bail on this country and move somewhere else with the way things are going and if I kind of make the situation more clear one way or the other like if I do well with the market I can move to a another country with a more comfortable buffer or if I fail and go broke or otherwise lose a lot of money, then I know that I have to continue on the grad school new career path to stay here and make more money.
I haven’t posted to the thread in a few days because I’ve been traveling. I’m currently in the middle of the Atlantic and it does amuse me a little bit that the internet access is really good on this ship because of starlink which I’m going to use to try to short Tesla and do my tiny little part of sinking Musk
I’ve had a bit of a terrifying thought. We know Trump is manipulating the market to enrich his buddies right? Well the Tesla earnings are due next week and it’s likely to be a moment that Tesla could potentially crash pretty hard cuz it’s not going to be good news. What if Trump causes a dump and pump in the market at the same time the Tesla earnings get released and the sort of market exuberance where it spikes up happens during the Tesla time and the earnings kind of get lost in the shovel and since it’s like a mass delusion / meme stock that might be the cover that people need to keep on believing and keep the Tesla stock high. I didn’t factor in the Trump Factor as much as I should have with Tesla because his dumping pumps are definitely something that can massively change the value of Tesla at any given day.
I also have another concern. I don’t really understand how the value of currency is determined or what effect all of this is going to have on the US dollar but if the dollar value is lowered because of whatever Trump is doing then the market is going to appear to rally right? Because the value of the stock to US Dollars will go up – basically you’ll have to pay more dollars for the stocks, so it will look like the price is increasing and the market is doing well. Is that right? I don’t know how to account for that in my strategy.
You on the Queen Mary II?
Sorry for the bit of a posting spree, I just have had a few thoughts over the last couple of days. The fact that Trump is blatantly pumping and dumping the market is making me reconsider even my anti-market investments. There has been a trend under Trump that people simply can’t believe that something like what Trump is doing is happening here and so for 12 years now they’ve been in collective denial about it. People think that the sort of things Trump is doing happens in a place like North Korea or a banana republic, not the US, and so they just deny in their own minds that these things are actually happening. This is part of what has helped normalize and sane wash all of the crazy stuff Trump is doing. And the market is sort of acting in the same way, like they’re thinking we can’t really be self-destructing the world order that favors the US and taking the US economy and position in the economic and finance world for decades. They think this can’t be happening, he’s going to call it off at any minute and everything’s going to be fine again. and so they’re so eager to see that sanity return that as soon as anything indicates that things are going in that direction like when Trump pulled back or put a 90-day pause on his tariffs the market absolutely skyrocketed because people are so eager to be like oh okay crazy this is over finally we’re back to being sane again. They’re wrong because of the delusion that I described above but it does mean that at any time any remotely positive news is going to result in massive market spikes and it’s really hard to account for that in any sort of investment that I’m not sure that what I thought was a rational decision to do things like short Tesla and short consumer discretionary can possibly be anything but completely random at this point because the Trump craziness and the market delusion is bigger than any sane market Force at work here.
Yes, I agree with you here: you can’t act rationally in an irrational market, or as Adorno wrote: there is no right life to be lived in the wrong one.
And on top of that there is market manipulation and very powerful vested interests. You are fighting an uphill struggle there. The odds are not in your favour
If you know what Trump is going to announce and when, it is trivial to profit on it. For a time.
I think we’re already starting to see investors go numb to it. Friday it was announced that we would have a reprieve on certain things like computers and phones. And we’re seeing today exactly the bump you’d expect.
However. Over the weekend, members of the administration were saying there would be no such reprieve. Markets seem to be ignoring that, even though one would expect the contradictory statements to pull markets down, or at least hold steady.
At some point we may stop reacting, and in the unlikely event Trump has any brains, that might be the plan. Once we stop reacting, he can do what he wants without consequences.