But people and psychology are a big part of reality. Although it’s fine for you to favor investment grade bonds if that’s what suits your investment needs and risk tolerance, and I would never tell anyone they ‘should’ invest in stocks without knowing their situation, but your theme has a common basic flaw. An efficient market doesn’t mean that prices don’t fluctuate for what ultimately turns out to be no good reason, it just means it’s very hard to guess at the time whether it was a good reason or not. IOW stocks move all over the place compared to what fantasy world where they wouldn’t?
And companies which make pretzels in WI may in fact be affected by the Brexit, in their real business, by any number of conduits like:
-it presages a general unraveling of the EU; that would affect more pretzel consumers who work in areas of the economy affected by business with the EU, which is bigger than business with the UK alone. The Brexit vote, apparently negative for the UK economy but carried along by populist bitterness, might even give a sign about the likelihood of the US electing a buffoonish populist to the White House and thereby hurting its own economy.
-the instability in markets themselves has knock on effects on an already fragile world and US ‘recovery’ barely worthy of the name as it is.
And so on. A lot of those explanations involve ‘people and psychology’, but markets are the interaction of people. What wouldn’t make sense would be prices not changing at all just because the possible knock on effects haven’t actually happened. It’s rational that the greater likelihood of them happening is factored into prices.
If people of your general attitude could tell me fairly consistently when or to what degree the up or down gyration of the market was justified or not, it would be a more useful type of observation. And the stuff about individual stocks, also dubious actually, isn’t really relevant. An individual stock didn’t drop on Friday, whole overseas stock markets dropped 6-8% in one day in US$ terms, though the US stock market only dropped around 3.5% and was down much less than that for the week.