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Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

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Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#861

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

Robotbeat wrote: post #675
beambot wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US fertility rate is approx. 1.8, well below population sustainability. If it weren't for immigration (a political policy question), the US would have negative population growth too.

It's crazy to me that so many generally pro-business folks have suddenly turned against immigration in the US. It's pretty much the US's best bet at continued above-OECD-average economic growth (until the rest of the world becomes middle class). And the US is, culturally (well, mythologically) pretty pro-immigration and generally good at integration. sigh

Without population growth, the economy won't grow as quickly, sure. It may even shrink. But does that matter per capita? I'm curious how population dynamics has effected Japan on an individual financial level.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#862

Post by btrettel »

dntbnmpls wrote: post #825
bytematic wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't seem to understand that you don't pull all your retirement out at once, so the market going up or down doesn't really affect that

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.

I took a graduate level measure-theoretic probability theory class. The professor had this rant about how "buy low, sell high" was a bad idea, it's all about how long you stay in the market. He had a mathematical proof that, if I recall correctly, only held if the random process is monotonically increasing in expectation, which of course is not guaranteed.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#863

Post by fgonzag »

virtue3 wrote: post #612
magicsmoke wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#864

Post by mactrey »

typeformer wrote: post #860
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.

Bonds yields are the lowest they have been since the great recession.

Yields are low because bond prices are high. It's not a bad time to be selling down your bond portfolio right now.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#865

Post by cletus »

malandrew wrote: post #521
mensetmanusman wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, over half of GDP growth is tied to population growth. If 2% of humanity is about to die...

I'm wondering if what 2% dies matters. This disease is mostly going to kill people past their prime working years. There are going to be tons of sociological changes. Just speculating here: - Social security could have it's date of insolvency extended. It's currently predicted to be insolvent by 2037. Most pension programs in the world will be relieved of pressure if many of those over 60 years of age die. Many state…

> Social security could have it's date of insolvency extended

As others have pointed out, "insolvency" for SS is nothing more than a policy position.

> Many homes may go on the market as these older folks that own much of the housing stock pass away

At worst this would speed up the inevitable (at least as some see it). This coming change has been talked about for years and is known as the "Silver Tsunami" [1].

> My biggest concern is losing a lot of that voting block as older voters often serve as a check against naive ideas that younger voter

Here's where you go off the deep end. The irony in all this is that the demographic hit hardest may well be Fox News and Trump's core constituency. I certainly don't wish anyone ill here but if it's going to happen anyway, it's hard not to see the silver lining.

Older voters are increasingly a huge problem, politically speaking (IMHO). They have no concept of long term consequences. They're just trying to avoid anything upsetting the apple cart in the short time they have left here. They fight change of any sort. They're easy pickings for fear-mongering and, as a group, incredibly easy to manipulate.

Your concern about "socialist" policies at the Federal level I'm afraid puts you in a huge voting bloc in the US of those who see no way to solve certain problems that literally no one else has (eg gun violence).

Reasonable people can disagree about how best to provide health care to people but the current system of being tied to employment is an unmitigated disaster that simply has to change. Doing things at the "state" level isn't necessarily better either as all you end up doing is creating 50 regional monopolies that all need to duplicate the same effort.

[1]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-housing-markets-will...

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#866

Post by anonuser123456 »

FabHK wrote: post #757
Der_Einzige wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Than why do I keep getting richer on my puts? Maybe it's because there are actually ways to make money during a crisis...

Buying lottery tickets totally works, someone can claim every week. https://xkcd.com/1827/

Not quite.

A lottery is ergodic, while a pandemic is not. No one can know the course of a pandemic early on, so the precautionary principle dominates. Also, income/employment is coupled to the market. If the market tanks out, people can lose their jobs, given the downturn a double whammy for "buy and hold"ers.

Personally, I jumped into cash/Treasuries and made some puts/bets on SPY. In the worst case, nothing happens and I'm out a little money. But my job pays me more money every week, so being out a little money isn't such a big deal.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#867

Post by btilly »

lutorm wrote: post #842
btilly wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the long term. Let's go back 150 years and invest in a random stock market wherever you happened to live. If you lived in the USA or England, this was a great idea and worked out brilliantly. If you lived in countries like Italy, Germany and Russia, you lost everything when those stock markets were closed down in the first half of the 20th century. You can't say "historically over the long term" then project for…

If you lived in countries like Italy, Germany and Russia, you lost everything when those stock markets were closed down in the first half of the 20th century. This may be true, but then we're talking about such large changes that investment advice sort of becomes pointless. I mean no doubt that life would have sucked in those situations, but there's no investment choice that would have saved you either. Like, if we w…

I mean no doubt that life would have sucked in those situations, but there's no investment choice that would have saved you either.

Guaranteed saving, no. But keeping an emergency supply of highly portable wealth in the form of gold worked surprisingly well for most of those historical examples. (The ironic exception being the USA where we confiscated people's gold under Roosevelt.)

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#868

Post by cletus »

chii wrote: post #790
thedance wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another good example of long-term decline is gold. In real dollars gold has never returned to its 1980 price. It went up 10x in the decade to 1980 and some people thought it would just go up forever. If you bought the dip after gold peaked, you're _still_ underwater.

The reason is that gold is itself a useless piece of metal (electronics and jewellery notwithstanding). Its only use is as a hedge against the gov't issued currency. Therefore, to bet that gold increases in value means you're betting against the country you're in doing well. But in that case, you're better off buying a bunker and bullets and long life stored goods. because gold is useless if the country you're in fai…

> The reason is that gold is itself a useless piece of metal (electronics and jewellery notwithstanding)

Gold being an excellent conductor while being mostly inert, solid at room temperature and highly malleable seems to be a pretty useful set of properties.

> because gold is useless if the country you're in fails!

Not entirely true. You have to look at why gold became one of the earliest mediums for exchange in the first place. I'd list six primary properties:

1. High density

2. Relative scarcity

3. Distinct appearance

4. Solid

5. Inert

6. Malleable

It turns out density is a really important one. Why? Imagine your country stamps gold coins. If you can take a coin of unknown origin and weigh it against a known good coin, you can pretty easily detect a forgery by it having lower weight. Gold isn't the densest element but it pretty much was until modern times. The only one other that was reasonably accessible was platinum, which was pretty valuable in its own right.

Even the apocalypse will have trade and need a medium for exchange.

> The only other use for gold as far as i see

You're not looking far enough. Gold has been used in places where the local currency has become questionable due to, say, inflation, (effective or actual) government confiscation and so on. Even refugees as recent as the Vietnam War would try and escape with gold.

In recent years India tried to invalidate bank notes in circulation with very little notice that set off a bit of a panic. That's not a problem gold has.

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#869

Post by Ericson2314 »

ttul wrote: 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 Matt Levine wrote

> It’s a little weird for a mutual-fund or hedge-fund manager to have a lot of uninvested assets (why are you charging fees on a big cash position?), while it’s perfectly normal for private-equity managers to invest a bit of their fund at a time and call capital later as it is needed.

So how much of a bias is there in behavior is there in practice and rhetoric against cutting your losses, pulling out, and waiting for things to be less volatile/risky-seeming?

Re: Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

#870

Post by xvilka »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #854
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.

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.
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