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Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

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Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#881

Post by porknubbins »

pedalpete wrote: post #824

It was not that long ago that the "experts" were saying the Boom-Bust Cycle had ended. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-22/bridgewat... Buffett, Dalio and others have been preparing for this time for a while. This is when money is made or lost. If you have the ability and the stomach for it. I'm not suggesting you buy today, I personally don't believe the worst is behind us. But an opportunity is comin…

The “we have beaten the business cycle” is a pretty bold claim I agree, but I don’t see anything here that contradicts it yet. We have a market psychology panic, but unless low earnings and unemployment follow its not really an economic bust.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#882

Post by xvilka »

magicsmoke wrote: post #141
pradn wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we can use garbage-collected languages in trading systems without turning on the garbage collector - just collect it all at the end of the trading day. I'm joking but this is a real technique.

It is, there was this HFT firm I interned at once that rebooted all their servers at the end of the trading day to make sure they would start clean and fast the next day.

Now I understand why Jane Street uses OCaml. It has less of the GC problems.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#883

Post by njarboe »

coliveira wrote: post #833
Reedx wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To help adopt a sober approach, it's worth watching this interview with Warren Buffett who shares his thinking re: market and Coronavirus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvEas_zZ4fM&t=21s One of the points he makes is that you should think about stocks as businesses. Instead of "I bought a stock" think "I bought a business". That puts you in a better frame of mind and perspective for the long term. i.e., You don't b…

Two things make Warren different: (1) he is a professional money manager, which means that he is investing other peoples money. (2) because of (1), he never needed the money he is investing. It is much easier to have long time frames when you're investing money that is not yours.

Warren Buffet still owns 6% of Berkshire Hathaway. Maybe a more correct statement would be "If you have money you don't immediately need to spend, it is much easier to have a long time frame for investing". Hopefully the money in people's retirement accounts is this type of money.

Most money managers have extremely short time frame investment horizons and are just looking to get their 2 and 20.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#884

Post by imtringued »

throwaway34241 wrote: post #681
01100011 wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cash may be a perfectly fine choice over the next year. You don't have to invest in something if the conditions are not right.

Cash may be a perfectly fine choice, it could also be a very sub-optimal choice. Same goes for stocks, bonds, gold, etc. Of course you don't have to do it if the conditions are not right but knowing if the conditions are right is the tricky part. In order for some people to beat the investment average by timing the market someone else must underperform the average. Active investment management is in general a zero-su…

The problem with timing the market is that people get lucky once and then think they can replicate their success again and again.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#885

Post by verbify »

mmhsieh wrote: post #875
dntbnmpls wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that nothing says markets will go up forever. Take japan's nikkei index. Dropped in the early 90s and is still down 50% 30 years later. Choose the "all" to see the entire chart. https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/stock-market It isn't a law of nature that the S&P or Dow has to regain its losses in X number of years. S&P can drop and stay down for decades which can absolutely affect retirees.

+1. it took about 3.5 decades to return to the levels of the pre-'29 crash. bear markets can indeed drag for decades. stockbroker happy-talk tends to gloss over these facts.

If you had reinvested your dividends, you'd have gotten your money back by the end of the war (and you'd only have lost 1 or 2% approximately six years later).

35 years later you would have an annual return (inflation adjusted) of 6% (6.5 times as much as you put in).

And this is somebody who invested in the absolute peak of the market in 1929, and then saw the worst crash in history, followed by the worst war in history.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#886

Post by pertymcpert »

fgonzag wrote: post #863
virtue3 wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes a lot of logical sense. Every single ms counts in those cases.

It reeks of code base problems or general misunderstanding of systems administration. Easier to just make sure you're not leaking memory (profilers exist) and actually monitoring the servers than having to reboot your servers just in case.

Things like heap fragmentation still happen.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#887

Post by 205guy »

xvilka wrote: post #870
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a key point. Especially if we actually start doing something about CO2 emissions, which will mean reducing energy consumption for the next couple of decades. Stock market growth has historically been tightly linked with energy consumption growth.

While the point of probability of staying low holds, I don't think there is a tight coupling with the energy consumption. Surely, nature (business ecosystem) will find a way for growth driver even without energy density increase.

I think nature's growth will be like 1% or less, certainly not the stock market growth people are used to. To me, it is obvious there is a tight coupling: energy does work instead of humans/animals, thus allowing more productivity. When you look at a construction site it's just human directed diesel-energy (with some chemical energy in the concrete).

Much of the developed world is transitioning to a service economy that relies less on the fossil fuels, but it still relies on the inputs that do (agriculture, electronics, offshore manufacturing). And we've set up the economy around fuel consumption: long commutes from suburbia, inefficient houses, processed and packaged foods, etc. And what about the travel industry: burning fossil fuels for no productivity (just realized it acts as a mop for the excess capital).

If we're lucky, we can use the fossil energy to bootstrap the renewable energy, then we can eat farmed foods, drive electric cars, and work on computers remotely. But there just won't be the energy to drive the economy the way cheap energy does.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#889

Post by verbify »

walshemj wrote: post #823
missosoup wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those not in the loop: it's been impossible to make transactions on a number of platforms including Robinhood due to the overwhelmingly high load causing those platforms to fail. A lot of people were basically locked out from trading.

I got a warning when I logged into Interactive Investor (UK) this morning and its still there now. "Please be aware that due to exceptional market volatility, there may be situations in which it is difficult to obtain a price for your trade." Will be interesting to see what effect the Budget statement on Wednesday

I think the government are damned whatever they do. A massive fiscal stimulus admits there's a massive problem (and the government has been trying to project a quiet confidence that this is something under control), so markets will tank. A small response could be seen as inadequate.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#890

Post by throwaway743 »

OJFord wrote: post #830
thekyle wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally, shouldn't someone planning to retire have already moved more of their money to bonds? Then they could just withdrawal from the bonds portion of the portfolio (which is likely up right now) while the stock market recovers.

However you frame it, there's always a time you start withdrawals. And if when you planned to do that coincides with a dip, of course you'll have second thoughts.

Did so about a year ago based on SMAs and momentum. Only wish there was a cash option to put have them move everything to for the time being, but only had bonds as an option.

Best thing is to watch out for the SMA support levels. Just got through a major death cross and looks to be heading further down

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