
$3.4T has been wiped out of the stock market in a week - LinuxBender
https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_0e8a16c2004b0aa01f39696ae8a3acdb
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jiveturkey
OMG. I love lite.cnn.com. Please oh please, HN moderators, change all CNN
links to lite.cnn.com automatically from now on.

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taywrobel
I ran a quick comparison between this and the same article served via AMP.

Lite:

\- 6 Resources Loaded

\- 396ms Load Time

\- 452KB total size (majority of which is two analytics JS scripts)

AMP:

\- 241 Resources Loaded

\- 4.87s Load time

\- 6.15MB total size

\- 31 JS Errors

\- 10 JS Warnings

AMP is no replacement for a good, minimalist design.

FYI, there's an equivalent for NPR as well -
[https://text.npr.org/about.html](https://text.npr.org/about.html)

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_bxg1
"Stocks are on sale this week"

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gentleman11
I still think they’ll be on bigger sale next week

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katmannthree
I imagine they'll stay on sale until the US reaches the point China is at
right now, signs of containment and tentative resumption of normal economic
activities.

~~~
alpineidyll3
Monetize your bet then. :P Sell some calls a few weeks in the future. Implied
volatility is very high right now.

~~~
katmannthree
If I could afford to do that I would. I remain an observer, I'm concerned
about remaining solvent through whatever the next few months bring.

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ipnon
This seems like a lot of money in terms of personal finance. It's hard to
imagine having $3,400,000,000,000 less money in your savings account.

But global nominal GDP was $80,934,771,028,340 in 2017 [0]. This is a pothole.

[0] [https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-
country/](https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/)

~~~
taywrobel
It's a 4.2% drop, using your numbers. That's not a pothole. If looking at my
savings account, I saw a sudden 4.2% drop it would not just be a "meh, it
happens, no problem here" type situation.

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entropea
That would be like $10 for most of the country.

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easton_s
When a person has $240 bucks in their account they know exactly what that $10
is for.

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gentleman11
Fair, but back when I had $240 in my account, I didn’t have any stocks. Stocks
were rich person problems to me back then

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alpineidyll3
To use 'wiped out' to describe market price changes doesn't really help people
understand why this happens. It's this type of thinking which has killed
interest rates, and has grown wealth inequality.

A better headline would be: "Demand for equity in companies with flat earnings
potential returned to levels seen earlier in the year."

The subheadline would be: "speculative purchases banking on buybacks issued
with cheap debt financed with promised rate cuts temporarily paused"

The sub-sub-headline would be: "CEO's plan aggressive debt financing to secure
bonuses tied to stock price, not performance."

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jithurjacob
Can someone please explain how the money gets wiped out?

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ActorNightly
This is gonna be sort of basic but i think it conveys the main point

Lets say that you own x units of item y. You sell one of item y to someone for
$100 dollars on an established exchange. According to the exchange, you have
100*(x-1) dollars of wealth.

Next day, some person comes along and tries to sell the same item for $100,
but can only find a buyer for $50. Your wealth has now been cut in half.

~~~
saidajigumi
Then there's Warren Buffet's approach, which is to understand the "value" of
the asset. He uses an example around a farm he purchased, one of his early
investments. He likened the stock market to a (hypothetical) crazy neighbor to
his farm, who every morning shouts a purchase price over the fence at him. One
day, the price is _half_ what it was the prior day! Buffet's lesson is that he
learned to remain calm, because the underlying value of the investment didn't
change.

Thus the challenge is separating market feedback reactions (aka fear and
bidding robots) from real-world valuation adjustments (aka mere delayed demand
vs. destruction of long-term value).

~~~
strbean
This is an excellent analogy. The stock market is an aggregate of people's
sentiments and numerical analyses (which often have absolutely no predictive
power).

I think the old George Carlin quote applies perfectly to it - "Think of how
stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than
that."

If you've ever tried to pick stocks, you'll see countless examples where the
stock price just seems to ignore the realities of a company. Level Three
Communications taught me that lesson. Huge backbone fiber provider, growing
and scoring major contracts continually, increasing revenues/profits for a
decade, and the stock prices was practically constant. Then they rebrand as a
CDN (with zero impact to how they operate) and their price rides the buzzword
wave right into a big acquisition.

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buboard
3.4 imaginary trillion

~~~
ars
If you consider that money to be imaginary, then all money is imaginary.

Money only has value because people assign it value. So since people assign
stocks value they have value.

It's logically inconsistent to consider this loss imaginary but other money to
be real.

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buboard
this is not money, it's market cap

~~~
gowld
Which people sell for money.

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nostromo
Seems like an overreaction, but healthy for people who are long.

Interesting take: “Flu worse than corona.”

[https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fau9wo/flu_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fau9wo/flu_worse_than_corona_diamond_princess_statistics/.compact)

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jmnicolas
Once again, if this is so benign the why China quarantined half the population
?

One of the possibility would be that the virus might much more virulent on
Asians (I assume the Diamond Princess passengers are mostly white).

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nostromo
China acted before having the full picture.

We still don’t have the full picture, but this is looking to be much milder
than originally feared.

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gdubs
This is something we’ll really only know in hindsight, but it’s reminiscent of
the reaction post-y2k. People put in a lot of work to ensure there wasn’t a
crisis, but the media narrative was that it was an overreaction (igniting all
the work put in).

China — and this is not meant to give them a pass on all sorts of errors and
shortcomings — took fairly dramatic measures and were well equipped.

My concern with this virus compared to SARS is that it spreads much easier,
making the problem one of infrastructure and capacity to deal with a large
number of cases all at once. E.g., how quickly can we ramp up to deal with a
potential outbreak at scale in terms of ventilator beds, etc.

And if not for this, then the next one. Coronavirus has raised a lot of
questions about our preparedness and strategy for coping with a pandemic — and
personally it feels like we’re sleepwalking a bit here in the West.

