Summary
The U.S. stock market has lost over $5 trillion in value in three weeks as the S&P 500 fell 10% from its record high.
The decline, driven by concerns over Trump’s trade policies and slowing economic growth, has led to weaker consumer sentiment and cautious corporate outlooks.
Barclays strategist Emmanuel Cau noted rising uncertainty among investors.
The selloff has also hit AI-related stocks, with Nvidia down 17% and the Magnificent Seven ETF falling 16%.
I just have it all automated through my job, maxing out the 401k there and a Roth maxed out through a robo-investor. I’m not smart enough to try manually buying stocks. I did dump a thousand into random stock and crypto a few years ago and just don’t touch it.
No one is, who doesn’t have insider information.
There have been numerous studies on the efficacy of active traders, professional, amateur, institutional, etc.
The results are that the average active trader is no more effective than trading completely randomly.
In fact, somewhere around 80% of major, actively traded hedge funds… underperformed the overall stock market in the last 15 years.
Anytime a ‘genuis quant stock wizard’ type figures out some new technical strategy that actually works, the other professional technical quants reverse engineer it within hours, days, weeks at max, and then the whole class of fancy pants people have that strategy, thus it stops working.
Thats why 401ks almost all are just indexed funds, mostly made up of a basket of stocks that basically weights the whole DJIA or SP500 by market cap such that you are effectively buying a tiny slice of the entire market.
Imagine that bell curve graph with a caveman gronk on the left saying ‘active trading is basically gambling’, the nervous dude with ‘cool’ haircut with a page of text explaining his brilliant trading strategy, and then on the right side, the robed wizard guy saying ‘active trading is basically gambling’.
This is so true. For trading the saying “if everyone becomes XYZ no one is”. This may make a single person rich, but once a technique is known the market will adapt because everyone uses it and thereby become useless. You can analyse the market as much as you want. You can understand every single thing of it and if this happens you will realise, that the market is truly random. I once saw a good video which explained this, but there is no way I ever gonna find that specific video
I buy Vanguard ETFs which have low fees. Now I’m big into international post-Trump, so VXUS. You can get total bond market and stock market funds. This way you get diversification super easily.
(Note, not financial advice. Talk to a finance person ya wanker)
That sounds intriguing. Do you have any resources you recommend to read more on Vanguard ETFs?
I dove into Boglehead’s 3-fund portfolio guide. That would be a good place to start. You can also hire a finance person hourly for advice, which aligns their incentives with you (vs fee-based where they earn money on commission or dollars managed)