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Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

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Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's hardly symmetrical to the fear of losing the money that you have already invested – investors feel they have no choice but to sell before it gets worse, whereas in the rally you can always choose not to buy.

Short squeezes are akin to declines in terms of the psychology involved.

The average investor isn't subject to short squeezes...

Even better: the percentage split between long and short holders isn't 50%/50%

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#662
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter how much you didn't deserve downmodding, complaining about them only invites more. You have a better chance of recovery by not bringing them up, and the News Guidelines ask that you don't. Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your paragraph was a lot more annoying than his sentence.

It's true that such comments are annoying, but they're necessary as a feedback mechanism to regulate the site. Otherwise the site guidelines would have negligible effect.

They're more tedious to write than to read, if that helps at all.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#663
post #625

I notice that there are many commenters here offering opinions on the future price of equities. Note that nobody has any idea where equity prices will be in one day, never mind one year or ten years' time. As a retail investor (i.e. not extremely rich), you can't gain any advantage over the market that overcomes your transaction costs. So relax. There's nothing to do here. If you're contributing to a retirement fund,…

> Note that nobody has any idea where equity prices will be in one day, never mind one year or ten years' time. > So relax... keep buying lol

The error, actually, is in the first part rather than the second. We don't know where it will be in a day or a year, but there's good reason to think we know where it will be in ten years: about twice where it is now. It might be only 1.5x or it might be 3x, but it's not very likely to fall very far outside of that range.

Given that, if you have ten years to wait before you need your money, it's as good a place as any to put your surplus earnings today. Not to sell your car or borrow money, but as a reasonably safe long-term thing to do with money that you will use for your retirement.

And then forget about it. Buy a broad index and don't worry what it does on a daily basis, even days like today. Perhaps especially days like today.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#664
post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the inverse rings true as well. Bull markets are paved with the blood of pessimists.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but there's no blood from the pessimists since they don't really lose what they have. They just miss out.

There used to be a saying, something like if you missed the best 20 days of the market in the last century, you would just about break even.

Missing out is very, very expensive.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#665

Just to clarify the title: Trading was halted for 15 minutes.

Correct. 7% decline is a pause. If it drops 13% it will pause for another 15 minutes. If it drops 20% it will end trading for the day.

Wouldn't that incentivize people to sell before the pause/end of the trading day, creating a snowball effect?

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#666
post #31

For reference, someone might want to post a chart of the gains the markets have made in the past 5 years. I would hardly call this a crash.

Hah not a crash? Well it kinda is, and if it keeps going further down it will definitely cause a recession. The oil price drop was a huge punch in the gut, and I wonder what happens to US oil production if it stays this low for longer. Or well any oil production that can't compete with these prices.

Almost nobody is drilling new oil wells, they stopped last year sometime. Almost nobody because there are still investors keeping one skeleton crew running just so they have expertise for when the oil price recovers.

Once a well is drilled the cost to drill the well is a sunk cost. You keep pumping oil if the cost to run the pumps is less than the price you get. Most people with oil are large enough to shut down some wells to keep the price up a bit - they harm their own profit in the short term though and still need to sell enough oil to break even.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#667
post #625

I notice that there are many commenters here offering opinions on the future price of equities. Note that nobody has any idea where equity prices will be in one day, never mind one year or ten years' time. As a retail investor (i.e. not extremely rich), you can't gain any advantage over the market that overcomes your transaction costs. So relax. There's nothing to do here. If you're contributing to a retirement fund,…

> As a retail investor (i.e. not extremely rich), you can't gain any advantage over the market that overcomes your transaction costs.

Sure you can. You develop a system, learn how to find information, and make good predictions of future human behavior. You should learn the ins and outs of the product you're trading.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#668
post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long did it take Italy to go up three orders of magnitude in infection rate?

A bit less than 10x, an order of magnitude, every week. It's been really is very easy to see the future up until now. There's 9000 cases in Italy now; by the 16th of March, factoring in the containment measures, they could be 60-80k. About 10% need intensive care; there's probably 3000 IC beds available now. Very simple.

Yeah, I'm not sure why I was downvoted. It was a leading question to point out that "3 orders of magnitude" isn't far away at all.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#669
post #71
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been skeptical of the whole yield curve as metric thing because it's not directly tied to the actual state of the economy directly just to the sentiment about the market X years in the future. Given how much we know the whole market is prone to group think, self delusion, and outright manipulation I've grown very skeptical of any indicator about the market that comes directly from the market.

But the actual economy _is_ still about sentiment, no?

In most places yeah which is why the kind of highly instrumented self reflection of the sentiment like the yield curve inversion can be dangerous. It's not a sign that says there's going to be a recession it's just a sign the people in that market think there will be one.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#670
post #315

So, children of summer (there are many here who have only known the longest bull market in the last century), let me give you some free advice. If you're looking at this and wondering when to get in, to bargain hunt essentially, and you're asking yourself questions like "today? next week?", you need to step back and think again. Some points to consider: - If your time horizon is 10+ years out probably none of this ma…

IMO this is a sort of gamblers ruin that happens in the markets. If you can wait long enough you usually will see a positive return (across well indexed purchases) . However, often times you need the money sooner. This could be because that money was actually for a major purchase (like a home) or because a recession means you lose your job and are on the brink of financial disaster (meaning you have to sell out at lo…

Buying a house is not like losing your job, you're not supposed to put all your money in risky investments if you know you're going to need it in less than 5 years (for retirement, to go on extended unpaid leave, to buy a house, etc.).

But even for longer time horizons, I think the common wisdom that stocks are low risk over a long planning horizon is overblown: https://web.archive.org/web/20170911171611/http://www.norsta...

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