Dow just went over 400 down for the day

...

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I've fallen and I can't get up!!!

This presents a golden buying opportunity....:sarcasm:

I knew they weren't going to let me retire.

If not, and you've had your 401K for at least 3 months, you're still way ahead.

I only want to complain about all the money I'm losing now and not about all the money I made while the DOW was reaching historic highs. :sarcasm:

I've had a 401(k) for about 3 years (something I never expected when I was younger, but I got into a job that allowed me to set one up). It's still way ahead of where it was even 6 months ago. It's dropped quite a bit in the past couple of weeks but is still ahead of where it was a couple of months ago also.

Now if I was a speculator living day to day, I'd be more worried, but since I don't have any intention of touching that money for another 15 years or so, I'm only mildly concerned at the moment.

I'm also extremely amused at the "death of capitalism" meme I see pop up every time the DOW drops. About as silly as if there were a "capitalism reinvigorated" meme when the DOW went up.

Unfortunately (in some ways) capitalism's death or life doesn't have much to do with the daily stock market. It's a bit more entrenched than that.

That's why I have to spend half my time in the lounge relaxing.

They started to head south and I rationalized that I was still way ahead.
I can ride this out.
And I rode it, and I rode it.
When I got to 30% below where I started, I bailed.
At least I didn't stay in until they totally cratered.
Lock in some profits now, if you can.

seeing as how I worked shit jobs for 25 years and my 401(k) is all from bonuses at the job I have now.
I view bonuses as pure profit.

Sure what you say is true sometimes, but I'm going to give it more than a few days ...
If the stock market as a whole craters, then it won't make much difference anyway because the entire economy will be screwed at that point and locking in any profits won't make much difference. That's because if the economy as a whole gets screwed I'll be worrying about more than money I'm putting away for retirement. As will a lot of other people.

Because you should be well diversified so that very thing doesn't happen. Stocks, Bonds, currency, hard assets. If you only have a little bit to invest, mutual funds will do the diversification for you. There's no reason to place all your eggs in one basket when it comes to the market. That's never smart.

We're getting a new management company this year. I'm going to put the bulk in a natural resources fund, oil, gas, metals and mining. It's done real well over the last 5 years. I figure that stuff isn't going to go down in the next few years. The rest is going to be split between foreign and domestic stocks and high yield bonds.

If you can't take a correction in the market, then move your money into bonds.

I suspect that there's a lot of stuff like derivatives living in hedge funds that could get very, very bad if the market starts getting erratic. Hundreds of little LTCMs waiting to blow.

realignment that was going to take place anyways. Expect to see the market fall more over the next few months. It won't be much everyday, but it will slowly "sell-off" as investors realize the market has been hyped up for no logical reason.

causing the previous slide(Tues). I'm not able to spend anytime today researching, does anyone know what is driving this drop?

supposed to be linked to the softening of the housing market, bad loan defaults and high oil prices. Why do those 3 things have such a dramatic effect on the entire market? Surely not EVERYONE is invested in Countrywide and Exxon????

recently the market had quite a surge if you will and naturally people want to sell and lock in some profit while they can

...all of his economic advisers are going to be on CNBC in the morning.

This drop translates into little more than a 2% difference between yesterday and today and not a person on the planet knows if it'll go up or down tomorrow.

I don't know much about the stock market. But I've noticed that most of the time, there doesn't seem to be any consistent connection between what the stock market does and how good or bad life is.

The market goes up, and life doesn't get any better. The market goes down, and life usually does not get appreciably worse.



Go figure.

All the big money is made very quickly on the short side. The market slowly climbs a staircase as it rises and then jumps out a window as it falls. A month's worth of gains can be lost in a day or two. As always, the smart thing to do is to just follow the market: follow the trend up with buying and follow the trend down with short selling.

For a very entertaining read check out
http://www.mypivots.com/articles/booktext.aspx?bookname=Reminiscences%20of%20a%20Stock%20Operator

Chapters 8 and 9 especially since they cover the 1907 crash and may provide a sense of deja vu for where we are now.

You may have lost a lot of money on paper today and you would say this is bad. You may not have investments, like me, and it didn't hurt you today.


When the market goes up people say they made money. They only have money when they sell. What happened to some people today is that they could not sell in time to prevent losing what they gained a while back.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Or is it the market giveth and the market taketh away.

I think we are trained to think that what ever helps the wealthy helps us but that is the old trickle down theory I think. It's like this, when there is a lot of food at the banquet a lot of crumbs will fall on the floor for us to get. When there is little food at the banquet there are fewer crumbs for us to get.

A better scheme would be that all of us sit at the banquet table and no one sits on the floor waiting for crumbs to fall.

when the Dow passed 14K. Their silence must be deafening right about now.

"profit taking".

Well no kidding buddy, but the reasons things go down in price are a little more complicated than that. It is a miracle our economy functions at all. People have to work so much harder to compensate for all the high level looters. It has worked for a while but eventually we will have to pay our dues.

Stock crashing aerodynamics..........:shrug:

but scary correction. I don't think the sky is falling on us.

the next day?

Sheesh, the DOW is still up over 7% for the year. People freak out when it has a big dip but there are no threads day after day when it posts steady gains. The Dow could lose TWENTY PERCENT and it would only move it back to where it was 12 months ago.

At its low today, the Dow was down 449.77 before rising to close 311 in the negative.

was wathching it at Yahoo! when it hit -400 points.

All of the indexes are down:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/default.stm

:-)

at 2:50 it was actually down 448 points for the day. It rallied back in the last hour.

Right?

and we're no where near a high. Our markets have been dropping for years.