US stocks were sharply lower Friday as investors digested souring consumer sentiment and inflation data that showed an uptick in one of the Federal Reserve’s key gauges, underscoring the delicate state of the economy as businesses brace for President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
The Dow tumbled 750 points, or 1.77%, on Friday. The broader S&P 500 fell 2.1% and the Nasdaq Composite slid 2.8%.
. . .
Wall Street was also grappling with Trump’s announcement on Wednesday of 25% tariffs on all cars shipped into the US, set to go into effect April 3. Trump also announced tariffs on car parts like engines and transmissions, set to take effect “no later than May 3,” according to the proclamation he signed.
Looks like I made the right choice pulling most of my 401k out of stock/blended funds and into stable bonds.
Looks like I made the right choice by not saving money at all and working until I die.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue
At least you don’t have a drinking problem
No problem!
These are the type of comments I came to read on Lemmy.
It’s going well with the ‘Make America Great Again’ over the other side of the pond
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines
Bro just quit buying avocado toast and pull yourself up by them bootstraps, you’re just not working hard enough bro get on the grind and then you can maybe retire in a slightly larger cardboard box
Maybe even be able to afford the ritzier corrugated cardboard boxes everyone’s talking about?
You’ve made HALF the right choice. You “sold high”, which is great!
However, the harder part is knowing when to go back in for the “buy low” part. If you’re out of the market when that recovery occurs you’ll be missing out on those gains. I’ve look at historical recoveries and can tell there is no way I’ll know when that time is. I will guess wrong every time.
I hope you’re better at it than I am.
Most people arent playing the market daily. Especially in something like a 401k. You dont need to time the bottom. We’re already in a correction, and its still going. You can wait until the market recovers, and as long as you buy back at a price lower than what you sold, call it a win.
Dont chase, “what could have been” because youll always feel like you lost
Right, thats the magic, but its not that easy. No one knows when that will occur.
You have to accurately predict both a high enough point to profit, but also, and much harder, put the money back in when you decide its “low enough”. Look at historical recoveries. You said it yourself, most people aren’t playing the market daily. The folks that are pulling out may miss the recovery by weeks or more because they’re not watching. I know I don’t watch that closely, but I also don’t try to time the market.
Isn’t that what trying to time the market is doing? The folks that are pulling out to put in later are attempting to time the market.
I’m arguing the opposite. “Time in the market beats timing the market.”
We have a lot of the same points, but what im trying to drive home is that, “buy low, sell high,” doesnt mean, “buy the lowest, sell the peak.” Markets in correction right now, its generally trending down. Potentially will turn bear market. You dont need to follow daily to know that. Now is as good a time to sell as last week, or the peak. You didnt miss it.
When it goes down more, you dont need to see the bottom. You can wait until it hits recovery or bull market even, and buy back. That point will likely be lower than where you sold even if its not the lowest. You dont need to buy the bottom, but buying lower than you sold is a win.
I agree, especially since interest rates are currently relatively high, it’s quite OK to remain liquid these days.
So when are you recommending buying back in with your strategy? 1 point lower than you sold for? 10? 100? 1000?
Unless you miss that point, and you have to buy back in higher than you sold for, and it could be years before its ever low enough for you to “buy back in low than you sold”.
If you buy back in when its higher than your arbitrary threshold, but then drops back down again the next day, do you sell again?
I went almost 100% cash recently. I’m waiting for another 10% decline in the sp500. Then reassessing. Probably start buying back gradually.
Never thought I’d time the market with this much of my money. In ‘07, I didn’t sell. I shoveled as much as I could into that furnace. This time truly is different, though. The prez works for a foreign adversary.
I wish you luck. This is the fourth huge stock selloff in my lifetime, and for none of them did I accurately predict the recovery.
Dude. This isn’t a huge selloff. This is barely a selloff. For now, anyway.
Those are technical terms. Thats when i recommend buying back in.
Those are only defined for a time period historically. When those time periods have those names, you’re at the point I’m talking about where you may have missed the entry point to buy in cheaply. Nobody says, with any faith or knowledge, “this is it! this is the recovery starting right now!”.
There are mathmatical definitions. Like our current correction happened when we were 10% below peak. Thats what i mean by calling them technical terms
Timing the exact top and bottom is impossible, but you can always sell at an all-time high and buy at a 52 week low.
Personally, I find it more effective for myself if I frame it in terms of “owning the most shares” instead of “making the most dollars”.
If I started with 100 shares and now have 200 shares, I consider that a win, even if the 200 shares together are worth less than the 100 shares were at one time.
An all-time high? So on point over the prior record and you sell?
I’m not understanding your strategy here. What are you accomplishing by putting your money back into the market at the dollar figure equal to the lowest value in the last year (52 weeks)? Especially if you sold at one point over the prior record (the all time high) you could be out of the market for years while stocks are on a rapid increase. The last 2 years of the S&P500 were both north of 23% returns back to back. Using your method you would have sold sometime in 2022 losing all those HUGE gains.
What if the recover occurs prior to stocks ever hitting the 52 week low? You’d still be out of the market and will have missed the recovery.
This confuses me even more. Number of shares is completely irrelevant. Stock splits double shares (and half values), a reverse stock split would double value (but half number of shares). I mean, if you’re just interested in number of shares, you do you, but most people use stocks as an investment vehicle where the value of those stocks is primary value (voting rights being a second value but most people don’t care about that).
If you can’t even understand that I am obviously not including things like stock splits, then I don’t think my comment was intended for you.
If you’re holding the opinion that simply the number of shares of something is more important that the total value of dollars those shares represent, I’m not sure who your audience is for your comment to be intended for.
My audience is people who are literate. You’re just reading stuff into my comments that a reasonable person wouldn’t.
And that’s fine, you do your investment strategy. I’m happy with mine.
Go back and read our exchange. You wrote your position. I communicated my confusion with what I read of your position. You’ve done nothing to explain further what is wrong with how I explained how I understood your position except to say essentially “not that way”. You have yet to provide any more information for me to understand what your way actually is.
I’m not upset with you or your position, I’m genuinely confused. I’m happy to be corrected with my understanding of your position, but you’ve offered none. How else am I supposed to understand you? Just guess more and have you tell me “not that way” more? If you don’t want to talk about it more, thats fine too. I hope you have a great day.
I realize you are confused.
You don’t appreciate that having 200 shares of a fund today, at today’s valuation, is better than having 100 shares of that same fund today.
Because that’s the point I clearly made, which you ignored and constructed some kind of straw man on which you had your little Don Quixote party on.
And if you really want to understand the philosophy, the point is to take profits prudently and buy bargains when they present themselves. And that’s very much possible without exactly timing the market.
I have never sold at the top and never bought at the bottom. I have no crystal ball to time the market, but I have made a lot of profit buying low and selling high.
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You can never time the lowest point. What you can do however is guarantee yourself a massive gain over the next few years when the stocks inevitably go back to pre-trump levels by buying it now, which is already much lower than it was 2 months ago
Wait 16 months.
It’s gonna go lower before it’s done, but at 18 months people will know how the midterms look, and the next chance to break this 3/3 lock on government by the aristocracy.
Then it’s either dump it back in or dump it in the Nikkei or something as you negotiate the sale of the smoking ruin you called a house and get on the boat.
You’re cheating this exercise. We were talking about properly guessing when to buy back into the market, and you’ve predicated your solution with this:
This presupposes you’ve already sold to a cash position prior to the fall. So that would be accurately timing the market at the best time to sell off. If you sold even a month ago, you would have already incurred a loss from the highest peak value. You’re arguing against the parent post about selling off all stocks to a cash/bond position today. You’re both depending on a close-to-perfect timing of the market. He’s depending on buying in at the low, you’re depended on knowing when the high was to sell.
Also, I think its sound thinking to always be suspicious of anyone’s claim saying “What you can do however is guarantee yourself a massive gain” when talking about investments. There is no such thing as a guarantee in investing.
The right time to go back in is whenever this admin is done, there is no “low” when the floor keeps falling out.
That sounds like a rational answer. Stock markets are not rational. Also, who’s to say the next admin isn’t just a carbon copy of this one?
That’s great, until our money is worthless and hyper inflation sets in. Nothing will keep your money safe from that.
That is a good point. I think Turkey is a good example of that happening right now. I don’t know that they are technically an example of hyperinflation, but they have had extremely high inflation.
About Jan 21st, I moved 50% to “international developed market”, there is 0 stock from USA in the fund.
https://finviz.com/map.ashx?t=etf&st=ytd
Depends when you’re going to need that money. If it’s decades in the future, then reacting to market fluctuations like this only tend to make people lose money on the long run. There’s yet to be a stockmarket dip that we haven’t recovered from.
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