this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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Stock market indices fluctuate regularly. If you multiply a small normal percentage change in a national index by the size of an entire national economy you'll get a big number like $2 trillion to make an alarming headline.
There's a saying in stocks, if you want to see the trend, zoom out. If you're trying to push a narrative, zoom in. There's a reason alarmist publications pick very small time intervals when discussing how markets are affected by government actions.
(A) That was a temporary partial recovery. (B) That was Dow Jones, not the S&P. Nobody cares about the Dow Jones. It's not a real stock index.
The 2 trillion drop from the article represented about 4% of S&P Market Cap. And as of now the S&P is again down 4% percent today. A 4% drop is an alarming headline. And it is only the first day.
Edit:
You were given the earliest notification of the 4% market drop in the entire lemmy/reddit ecosystem right here on [email protected] and you wasted it by pretending it didn't happen.
Now the drop is up to 5% of S&P market cap and 6% of NASDAQ. Did you really think that Trump imposing even larger tariffs than the Smoot Harley tariffs that triggered the 12 year Great Depression wasn't going to affect the stock market?
I would have gotten much earlier notice if I cared about the markets, followed the news, and actively traded. Articles like this are unhelpful because they are written to be as alarmist as possible, and aimed at people who don't understand the markets.
People in the comments believe the alarmist headlines, when they are deliberately written to sound as bad as possible.
Its not reasonable to make conclusions off of 15m of data. Its manipulative to cite large numbers deliberately without context.
The fact that the trend happened to continue this time doesn't make anything I said untrue. The news has claimed markets have "plummeted" many times this year only to immediately recover. Articles like this aren't good predictions because they have been wrong every other time.
Anyone refering to market prices generating or erasing money, leave alone value, has serious misconceptions about the economy. Also we need to stop the worship of market capitalization. The market price only reflects the price of currently traded stock. Have someone announce they are going to buy up or dump 20% of any stock and see it flying or tanking.
I mean, yeah, it's totally imaginary value. But then again, so is all money... The current financial system is a nonsensical house of cards propped up mostly by how bad most everyone wants it to stay standing
That 'totally imaginary value' bought me a new car in January when I was Trump-proofing my life.
This was my first thought as well. $2T sounds life a lot but but I had no idea how much is actually in the market. Apparently $2T is nothing because even my index fund for the S&P 500 went up today.
That price yesterday was determined at market close 4pm EST and before the tariff announcement.
The $2 trillion loss was in futures trading after the market closed yesterday. It represents 4% of the total market cap of the S&P index. As of right now, the S&P is still down 4% for the day.
Well, damn.
Yup. Dotcom and Housing crisis saw the entire market drop over 50% each in ~3 years until lowest point, but since the 90s, the market has only gone up overall… 3000%. This is a blip, enjoy the sale.
The SP500 did not break the high of the Dotcom era for more than a decade. It did so briefly in 2007. And you know what happened next. It stayed below that high for another several years.
That's based on raw values. Adjusted for inflation I'm certain the Dotcom bust lasted until the mid-2010s. That's about when the tech industry really took off again too.
Also it's not up 3000% since the 90s. More like 800% give or take. The entirety of that being between the years 1990 to 2000 and 2015 to 2024. If one has only started paying attention to the markets the past several years would one be familiar with the paradigm of "enjoy the sale". The past decade has been the greatest bull market ever. Things had basically gone parabolic where gains were exponential and losses were only small and brief. It's no wonder people are spoilt.
Long term investors (read: the average person) must be willing to expect time frames on the order of a decade of stagnation. These periods can and do happen. Just because the past 10 years has been a fever dream doesn't mean we should forget lessons of the past 100 years.