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The January 2018 stock market - easy come, easy go.
- Thread Starter The Heretic
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Well got some AMAT calls today with earnings tomorrow after close. Hope for a beat and great guidance but looks good. Also took a bigger position in SVXY ([email protected]) with vix looking to drop more look good also.
Still curious if @TriggerDude15 has an update to the prediction of a market collapse. Honestly curious as he seemed to have some inside info the rest of us didn't have. I know the other thread is closed, but this one is still available for a response.
Does it matter at this point anyway? It didn't collapse, so even if there was some inside info, it was wrong.
What I'd really like to know is what info/sources to avoid in the future. A lot of people make predictions, including supposed experts. I like to know who not to listen to.
Could be there was no source at all.
Granted, that could certainly be the case.
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You strike me as a pretty smart guy in your investing and I don't think you need to listen to anybody in particular to make good decisions. I read a lot, I listen to the talking heads, I look at what they have done in the past, and I talk with a couple of friends who are good investors. One a bank vice president and another has about 6 million in bonds mostly now, since growth is not needed at this point.
After 30 years in the construction / real estate business, and a pretty hard core investor over the last 8 years, liquidated the construction business, bankruptcy, I have it pretty well figured out. I have the majority of our funds with EJ brokerage and they have done quite well. I certainly do not listen to random people spouting off on message boards and put any stock in it or make any financial moves based upon that bullsh*t. None of the soothsayers are worth listening to.
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Ooh that's a super tough call.
Read a bunch, listen a bunch, view a bunch, watch a bunch, mend it all together and you still need to make the calls that fit best for you, yours & your situations.
Fortune. Forbes. Maria Bartelomo. Fox Business. CNN money etc etc
The "trick" is to look for trends, but by the time folk are talking about it, it's too late (to make a meaningful short term gain). Long term? Yah absolutely!
It's been a long while since I meddled in stocks. Daytrading mostly with some mid term and some short term. Was as close to gambling as I'd ever like to get (actuality it is in fact gambling, just another nicer term for it). But it was interesting and fun, also very time consuming. Had the time then, and expendable income to do so.
Now? 401's and the like and mutual funds exclusively and we do not give it another thought. The market will go up, the market will go down. Happens. We just don't have the time to manage, nor the portfolio to have a wealth manager. It is what it is, and we're comfortable with that. May change going forwards, may not.
Folks crying chicken little? More than likely day traders trying to whip up a short etc. Happens & happens a lot on blogs, boards etc.
Yup and big money can and will always move the market or keep it down.
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Big money is not just billionaires. It is also the millions of small time investors with tens/hundreds of thousands shifting the focus of their portfolios around.
My IRA is still rebalancing (in total in the past 5 days or so I have moved about $150k from bonds into stocks ) but I am back up to where I was at the end of 2017 and before spring I hope to be back where I was 2 weeks ago.
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Looks like the inflation report didn't faze the market at all!
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It did, but not for long and not everybody
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Jeff Saut is a good one for RJ (EJ competitor so I'm biased)
So who do you think big money is? Its the firms that have YOUR money you invested. You think investors move the market? Its firms and very few people that can move 100+ million in a second to create demand or start a selloff.
I always like to get perspective. A year ago, Feb 15, 2017, the market closed at 20,611. Today it closed at 24,893. At the bottom of this correction, it hit 23,860 - still 3,249 above where it was a year ago. This is why it's important to focus on the long term and view the short term with some perspective.
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I think people who have IRAs and 401Ks are the big money. Together, they account for over $12 Trillion dollars in those retirement funds alone. More than twice that when you add in all other retirement funds.
When I put my money into a fund, the fund managers don't just willy nilly move the money around. They have to invest it as the prospectus says they will invest it - so much in shares of certain types of corporation, so much in bonds, etc.
When I moved my assets from bonds to equity heavy funds, I was the one that directed that be done, not Edward Jones, not Mass Mutual - me. You get some significant percentage of 401K/IRA holders directing that their assets be moved in or out of the market and stuff happens.
Trillions of dollars is big money and it is held by people like me and you. The typical equity/growth oriented fund is about 80/20 stock/bonds. The managers of those funds cannot make significant changes in how that money is invested - they are constrained by the profile/goals they advertise. They may have some percentage of a fund held in cash in money market accounts, but compared to stock or bonds, that is usually a small amount compared to when large numbers of owners of the shares move from one profile to another.
You get 10% of people who own 401Ks/IRAs moving completely in/out of the stock market, that is $1.2 Trillion dollars and even if it takes a couple of days, it is still a significant move in the market. Yes - big money.
You miss my point. Yes us little guys have a lot invested in overall market but not many of us actively manage it. Dump it in a mutual fund and let it sit. Look at Vanguard for example 3.5 trillion in assets with 4.5 trillion under management. 100-500 million to cover is pocket change and happens all the time. Thats how stocks get beat down or make runs is the big active market guys. If you invest in a mutual fund (most 401k/ira) big money chooses what stocks are in the fund not you so once again big money calling what happens.
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As I pointed out, they have to stay within the constraints of their portfolio/prospectus. They cannot just go out and buy penny stocks, they have to maintain their ratios and the type of stocks they can buy.
And I am not saying that most people actively manage their 401Ks/IRAs, my example was if just 10% of us "little people" decide to move in or out of the market - it makes 500 million look like chump change. Those funds have no control over that - if 10% of their customers dump them, they cannot do diddly about that. We control when and how much and even if we invest in their portfolios. When I moved back into the market it was a move from bonds to stocks, which is a high level abstraction, not a low level directive to buy this or that stock. Those kinds of moves by a significant number of people using a significant percentage of their assets, is much more significant than what any one fund is able to do.
Look at how many people here said they got out or into the market. That is a sample of the millions of people with assets in 401K/IRAs. Just 1% is a $120 billion. Of the people I know at work (besides myself) who shared with me how they reacted to the correction - 25% jumped back into the market in a significant amount, and had pulled out earlier before the correction.
In short, we have much more ability to make big moves with significant percentages of our investments than any one fund does. We can cash them out (move it into money market or even move it into our checking account), move from stocks to bonds and vice versa and so on. Any one fund cannot make those kinds of moves. When some significant percentage of us make a move in the same direction - that moves the market, not a piddling 100 million dollars, but hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars.
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