I know nothing the stock market does is ever good for actual people, and any direction the line goes will be used as an excuse to commit atrocities against the poor, but I do feel a little thrill seeing it go down as the contrivances of 'wealth' used to gaslight us into not taking the full value of our labor at least superficially collapse.
Ok just to clarify your first point: 60% of Americans have either a 401k or Roth IRA. The stock market is not the be all and end all economic factor but it does affect a large swath of Americans.
they 'have one', I have had friends who found out an employer created one for them with pitiful amounts of money in them, or they got paid partially in them. nobody I know genuinely believes they're going to retire. very few people I know believe in a far-future. not far as in 'i read the foundation novels and damn, that shit blew my mind because im the most basic bitch possible' i mean 'far future' as in 'I might die older than my grandparents'
that's not to disregard what you're saying completely, of course. it will fuck a lot of people up. im sure. but line-go-up hurts just as many, if not more, people.
The stock market is generally more of a "rich people's feelings" graph - very few Americans relatively are invested in any meaningful way, most if they are do so through a 401k or similar. That said, what "the market" hates most is uncertainty - and there's quite a lot of reasons to be uncertain at the moment between tariff threats and mass layoffs (not to mention geopolitical tensions).
Importantly though (and this is just a personal opinion) I think many stocks on the market are way overvalued. Executives and investors have used every trick in the book to "make a line go up", which means they aren't really operating on any business foundation designed for longevity or to withstand swings in the market. There's bubbles lurking in a lot of sectors. I'd guess at least some of this downwards momentum will be a market correction for some of these issues.
As always though, it's the folks invested through pensions and 401ks that have the most to lose relatively. The big players have probably already taken out their cash and are just waiting to see what they can buy up in a crash.
I watched a comedian on YouTube make a great point: When DeepSeek was announced the markets lost a trillion dollars in value and almost no one noticed except like twelve people.
whos cashing all this out? and are they paying taxes on it? like how does it work? can you just move your assets/ close out on positions and immediately shove them into some compounding interest account but still capture all the profit, with no capital gain tax?
Depends which country you live in. But in the US you’d still pay capital gains tax over it I reckon. Since it applies at the moment of the sale of an asset. Unless it’s a IRA or 401k then you pay income tax at withdrawal. Of course you pay the taxes end of year. So you can still put it in a savings account and receive interest on all the profits before you have to pay tax
If those stocks were held less than a year you pay income tax over all your short term trades total realized gains end of the year.
I’m fairly certain until you put the money in your bank account and out of your brokerage account. You can do whatever the hell you want, but I also don’t trade like that.
I agree with the sentiment but I work in IT and yearn for when we will get rid of Microsoft, Amazon, and the tech giants.
My mother won't buy anything American at the grocery store but uses Amazon and Facebook every day.
My coworkers won't buy American products but use Windows, Teams, and Office every day.
I may be using Linux, open source software, and avoid American tech when possible, but I still use Google and Gmail.
At some point we may want to (or should) also extend that boycott to software and tech services. Have our governments, institutions and people not dependent on American corporations. It can only be good for our sovereignty anyway.
I asked in another thread about the possibility and likelihood of a sort of "digital embargo" where the states would order American companies like steam to halt service.
Forget not being able to get oranges or having to eat frozen veggies part of the year, this is somewhere that I can't really change my buying habits and move on (my steam library can't leave steam in this example)
Big Tech always amplifies gyrations in the market. Hence, every single one of these stocks (except Microsoft, I just checked) is still beating the S&P 500 over 6 months, even with these drops. And Microsoft is still way up in the long term.
Look, I want meteors to hit them all, but huge swings are the norm for these now. Hotter stocks trade a lot like crypto these days.
its true if you zoom out 6mo to a year+ ...most of these tech stocks etc are still way up. but panic in the market make "dumb money" sell. smart money buy cheap...