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AMZN holding $2100 PM. Have to think 2000 will be tested soon. Although the split approaching should give a positive push so who knows
Wow, 30%. That’s a haircut.
The “experts” continued shouting hold tight. When obviously, if market conditions are setting up for a sustained sell off, the advice should be to sell and then plan on incrementally buying back in as the market declines. Don’t try to hit the exact bottom (guaranteed failure) but instead cost average down. But what the hell do we know? The experts say hold
Mike, finally a real trader you can follow
https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/05/23/martin-shkreli-is-back-he-loves-crypto/?fbclid=IwAR1Ppt2mde243GvwgegUw_8aN7JMrccw7D_WagpSG51kew4TFleOqc_yH-g
The Market Is Melting Down and People Are Feeling It. ‘My Stomach Is Churning All Day.’
Many are watching investments they meant for down payments, tuition or retirement shrink day after day
By Justin BaerFollow
May 21, 2022 12:00 am ET
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The last time Todd Jones heard this kind of panic in his clients’ voices, it was 2008 and the global financial system was on the brink of collapse.
Mr. Jones, the chief investment officer at investment advisory firm Gratus Capital in Atlanta, now finds himself fielding similar calls. Two clients, both retirees, asked him this month to move their portfolios entirely to cash. Mr. Jones persuaded them to stay the course, saying the best way for investors to achieve their goals is to still be in the market when it eventually rebounds.
“Those people were not in a good place,” said Mr. Jones, 43. “They had a lot of anxiety about goals and dreams and being able to live their lifestyles.”
Stocks, bonds and other assets are getting hammered this year as investors wrestle anew with the possibility that the U.S. is headed toward recession. On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average recorded its eighth straight week of declines, its longest such streak since 1932. The S&P 500 flirted with bear-market territory.
Families are watching the investments they meant for down payments or college tuition or retirement shrink, day after day. They’ve seen big retailers like Walmart and Target record their steepest stock drops in decades this week, after earnings that signaled an end to the pandemic spending boom.
The market turmoil has scared corporate chieftains away from taking their companies public. In Silicon Valley, dreams of multibillion-dollar valuations have been replaced by the reality of layoffs and recoiling investors.
Stock prices have been hurt by forces that appear in nearly every cycle, such as rising interest rates and slowing growth. There are also idiosyncratic ones, including the rapid return of inflation after decades at a low ebb, a wobbling Chinese economy and a war in Ukraine that has shocked commodity markets.
The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates twice this year and plans to keep doing so to curb inflation, but that makes investors worry it will slow the economy too fast or by too much.
S&P 500 bear markets and the current downturn, declines and duration
To investors it can feel there is no safe place. While the vast majority of individual investors are holding steady, that is in part because customary alternatives don’t offer much relief. Bonds, normally a haven when stocks are falling, have also been pummeled. The cryptocurrency market, pitched as a counterweight to traditional stocks, is sinking.
For Michael Hwang, a 23-year-old auditor in San Francisco, the market’s tumble means he could wind up taking out loans to get an M.B.A. He has been hoping to pay his tuition out of pocket when he eventually goes back to school.
For Arthur McCaffrey, an 80-year-old retired research scientist from Boston, it means wondering if he’ll live to see his investments recover.
Rick Rieder, the head of fixed income at giant asset manager BlackRock Inc., likened the state of financial markets to a Category 5 hurricane. The veteran bond trader has been in the business for three decades and said the rapid price swings are unlike anything he has seen.
Rick Rieder said many of the things rattling the markets are out of the Federal Reserve’s control.
PHOTO: ALFONSO DURAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
"My stomach is churning all day,” he said. “There are so many crosscurrents of uncertainty, and we aren’t going to get closure on any of them for weeks, if not months.”
Investors are used to the Fed stepping in to calm markets, but many of the dynamics rattling stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities are out of the central bank’s control, said Mr. Rieder: “The Fed can’t solve the supply shortage of corn or fertilizers, or the inability to get natural gas into Europe. They can’t build a sufficient inventory of homes.”
The plunge is a U-turn from stocks’ runup in 2020 and 2021. Then, unusually low interest rates and a surging money supply—byproducts of the government’s efforts to stave off a downturn—pushed stock indexes to repeated new highs. Some investors say the decline was long overdue and, now that it has arrived, could be difficult to repair.
“The Fed is going too far, inflation is a nightmare and the real-estate market is going to crash,” said Melissa Firestone, who sold many individual stocks in a retirement account last year.
Melissa Firestone, a 44-year-old economist specializing in the energy market, sold many of her individual stocks and bought a fund that shorts the S&P 500, betting on a drop. “The Fed is going too far, inflation is a nightmare and the real-estate market is going to crash,” she said.
Keith Yocum, a novelist and retired publishing executive who is 70, moved a third of his savings into money-market funds last year. Mr. Yocum doesn’t love keeping so much money in cash, especially with inflation eroding its value, but sees few better options.
In October, when stock prices were still hitting records, Craig Bartels moved most of his 401(k) and individual retirement account savings into money-market funds. Soon, he sold his cryptocurrency holdings and started shorting homebuilding stocks and Tesla Inc. through a brokerage account.
A 46-year-old real-estate broker in Zionsville, Ind., Mr. Bartels had looked to the distant past for advice, reading Ray Dalio’s recent book on economic history and Adrian Goldsworthy’s “How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower.”
“This sounds like us right now,” he thought.
His 20-year-old son, a college student, had told him he was trading a few thousand dollars through a Robinhood account. To Mr. Bartels, it looked like another sign of a coming reckoning.
A generation earlier, he was a day-trading college student himself. He did well, he said, but knew many who were “throwing money at internet stocks and had no idea what they were doing.” The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s soon popped. Today, Mr. Bartels is happy he changed course when he did. “I don’t think we’re anywhere near the bottom,” he said.
“I don’t think we’re anywhere near the bottom,” said Craig Bartels, a real-estate broker in Indiana.
PHOTO: ANNA POWELL DENTON FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Don McLeod, a former research manager at a Manhattan law firm, retired four years ago when the markets were strong. He checked his 401(k) account almost every day with glee.
When stocks started to turn in January, he continued checking daily out of fear, until the losses became too steep. By early May, his retirement accounts had fallen 25% in five months.
Mr. McLeod hopes the U.S. isn’t headed for a repeat of the “stagflation” of the 1970s. “When you’re banking on that money saved over your lifetime to carry you through and it starts to go away, you feel helpless,” he said. “I don’t want to go back to work at 66.”
Susan Wagner, a recent retiree who moved from Chicago to New Mexico’s Rio Rancho with her wife in 2020, took their retirement money out of the markets altogether this month.
“The anxiety was literally me losing sleep, tossing and turning at night wondering how much more we were going to lose,” Ms. Wagner said. Her wife, a former radiologist, was hesitant but eventually agreed. “It was too nerve-racking, and I was quite emotional about it,” Ms. Wagner said. “I was very upset by what was happening.”
Jim Cahn, chief investment officer of Wealth Enhancement Group in Minneapolis, said his clients are more nervous now than in 2008, the year of the financial crisis. The question he’s getting: “Where can I go to stop getting poorer?”
Keith Yocum said he can sympathize with fellow retirees who find the downturn unnerving.
PHOTO: DENISE YOCUM
The firm held webinars for clients in the market’s frothiest days last year, warning against loading up on tech stocks and highflying pandemic names such as Peloton, Mr. Cahn said. Lately the webinars have a different theme: Don’t panic.
The firm is looking at commodities, which tend to protect against inflation and are getting a boost from the war in Ukraine, and municipal bonds, which Mr. Cahn said are starting to look attractive.
Technology shares that soared in recent years, like Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. and Netflix Inc., have been hit especially hard. Dismaying results or darkening outlooks have cratered tech stocks and, at painful moments, helped pull down the broader market.
Market value lost since Jan. 3
Combined losses
$3.76 trillion
Jan. 3:
$2.99 trillion
$759 billion lost
APPLE
$2.23 trillion
market value
as of Friday
$2.51T
$624B lost
MICROSOFT
$1.89T
$1.92T
$487B lost
ALPHABET
$1.73T
$1.44T
$634B lost
$1.20T
AMAZON.COM
$1.09T
$517B lost
TESLA
$928B
$688B
$405B lost
META
$753B
$524B
$335B lost
NVIDIA
$418B
Source: Dow Jones Market Data
Peter Santilli/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
There have been so many bad days they’ve started to blur together, said Sonu Kalra, portfolio manager of Fidelity Investments’s Blue Chip Growth Fund.
Mr. Kalra was sitting in his suburban Boston home office in early February when Meta shocked Wall Street with disappointing earnings. As he watched its shares slide in after-hours trading, he felt angry at himself for failing to heed earlier warning signs.
“You feel a lot of pain and start questioning: ‘What could I have done differently?’ ” he said. “But you can’t cry over spilled milk. You have to move forward.”
At the time, he thought Meta’s issues were idiosyncratic and not a sign of a broad withdrawal from growth stocks. That came later, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent energy prices higher. “Oil permeates everything,” he said.
On Wednesday, Cole Smead, a portfolio manager at Smead Capital Management Inc., woke up early in Phoenix. Target, whose stock makes up about 5% of the Smead Value Fund, was set to report earnings. Target stock was down double digits in premarket trading. Mr. Smead put on a suit and headed in to his office.
That morning, Target hovered at 25% below Tuesday’s close. Mr. Smead decided it wasn’t productive to stare at a screen and watch his fifth-largest position in freefall. He picked up a book, the biography of George Hearst, the silver miner father of William Randolph Hearst.
“I figured he’ll probably teach me more than the markets will teach me that day,” he said.
Conventional investing wisdom says that over time, stock markets go up. Countless investors watched their savings grow by staying put in a market that rose sharply in the decade after the financial crisis. Those who held tight when the market crashed in early 2020 were rewarded when stocks resumed their upward climb within weeks.
To some market players, this year’s decline feels different. The government’s extraordinary stimulus measures that pushed the economy into a V-shaped recovery in 2020 have largely run out, replaced by policies aimed at controlling inflation. While the debate about whether a recession is on the way is far from settled, there is broad consensus the U.S. has entered a period of slower growth.
Mr. McCaffrey, the 80-year-old retired research scientist, has been buying Apple shares in recent weeks, automating the purchases for when the price is below a certain level. But overall, watching shares of his favored tech companies erode has been a gloomy experience. Apple is down 23% so far this year.
“It’s getting worse for people in my age group,” Mr. McCaffrey said, “simply because we don’t have time to wait for it to come back.”
It takes a lot to shake Kevin Landis, a fund manager whose tech-focused fund was battered by the tech wreckage of the early 2000s. But when Netflix announced disappointing quarterly results in April, Mr. Landis, sitting in his home office overlooking his tranquil suburban San Jose backyard, felt as if he’d been hit by an earthquake.
Mr. Landis had reason to be concerned: Roku, another streaming company, made up 14% of his tech fund at the end of March. He says he hasn’t sold any shares, even though Roku’s stock has sunk by nearly 60% this year.
“Probably the defining difference this time is last time I could just storm out of the office and go home,” he said. “This time, I’m working from home. So there’s no escaping it.”
Write to Justin Baer at justin.baer@wsj.com
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-market-is-melting-down-and-people-are-feeling-it-my-stomach-is-churning-all-day-11653105601?mod=e2fb&fbclid=IwAR0JrjQj0LJ4VfOFFQ2S1hPTks_NUsQGXEhYohMvcnUdOw3H346_iNYo5R4
Hadn’t looked at dogecoin in quite sometime until now. 8 cents. Ouch, so many people getting burned on crypto.
Yowza!
Things starting to roll over a bit. Have some QQQ and TSLA lottos
Never really trust these bounces for very long as of late. GL. Time to go play outside
ANZN bounce working out nicely for you
Some nice swings today
TSLA looking weak once again. Wonder where the floor will end up being?
The Fall of Terra: A Timeline of the Meteoric Rise and Crash of UST and LUNA
A detailed timeline of Terra's journey from its underdog start as a payments app in South Korea to a $60 billion crypto ecosystem to one of the biggest failures in crypto.
https://www.coindesk.com/learn/the-fall-of-terra-a-timeline-of-the-meteoric-rise-and-crash-of-ust-and-luna/
The Trucker Convoy Has Given Up on DC Yet Again. We Tried One Last Time to Find Out What They Wanted
https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/05/20/trucker-convoy-hagerstown-leaving-dc-again-what-did-they-want/?fbclid=IwAR2o6AGnGgkvTgVyYrYPaeAY__7FlaXRubaPVNkfmJdnfYicAd9VRr4x1AM
Was a hell of a trading day for sure.
Bit of a bounce day or more collapse day?
Yeah, was watching that too. Ended up hitting AMZN earlier. MELI is up as well.
MSTR is a trainwreck.
Had to sell my AMZN and NVDA early as headed to the airport. Hell unleashed is just about right. Go get em!!
Looking to hit NVDA puts at the open today
AMZN breaking thru 52 week low
Interesting set of circumstances with this one. Definitely bears watching. Pun intended.
Bitcoin Briefly Slips Below $30,000. Why Cryptos Are at Risk for More Losses.
https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/bitcoin-ether-crypto-prices-today-51652178442
“If the $30,000 level breaks, that could trigger a flash crash environment if several whales unload,” said Moya, referring to large Bitcoin holders that play an influential role in the market. “?Bitcoin’s long-term fundamentals have not changed in months, but growth/recession concerns have made this a very difficult environment.”
I flipped AMZN, TSLA and NVDA puts. Was a good morning but I was nervous holding. So alert for a sneak bear rally. Good luck today!
No kidding
The more she cuts, the more I’m thinking it might be time to buy. Lol $TSLA
https://www.benzinga.com/news/22/05/27097866/cathie-wood-makes-first-buy-in-a-legacy-automaker-on-monday-also-trims-more-shares-in-tesla
VIX really firing off into the close
GME finally under $100. Wonder how low that one will go?
Nice, looks like we are about to tap the LOD
TSLA getting destroyed today. I swear, Elon can't get out of his own way sometimes.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/elon-musk-cryptic-tweet-dying-mysterious-circumstances
Those bear rallies are always looming, just never know when one will take hold. I would not be surprised if we get one this week.
LOL!: ‘Elon Musk denies claim by Truth Social boss that Trump encouraged him to buy Twitter’
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/06/elon-musk-denies-claim-trump-encouraged-him-to-buy-twitter.html
10 year at 3.17% Up, up and away!
‘We are nowhere near the bottom,’ top economist says as global markets crater
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/06/nowhere-near-the-bottom-top-economist-says-as-global-markets-crater.html
“In the euro zone and in the U.S. they are nowhere near realizing that actually there will be some form of contraction of economic activity,” he later added.
10 year at HOD 3.13% Let’s see what Monday brings.
https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/US10Y