Stock Market/Investing/Fin Planning Catch-All

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I panic sold my puts yesterday. Crying.
I'm not sure you're really up for this sort of thing. Active trading really isn't for everyone. I used to control my own portfolio but not any more. It's too complicated; my anxiety is too high; and it just seems a waste of time because I'm not going to beat the market.
 
I'm not sure you're really up for this sort of thing. Active trading really isn't for everyone. I used to control my own portfolio but not any more. It's too complicated; my anxiety is too high; and it just seems a waste of time because I'm not going to beat the market.
Probably but I am only doing a small amount of what I have gained and won’t do more.

I find it both stressful and exhilarating. The latter is a bit weird as I have never been a gambler.

I promise I will not be doing this in a year.
 
Yes, but I'm still down almost 5% on the year.
Wish I was only down 5% bro. That's pretty good in all this craziness, although I'm guessing after today you're down a little more. I finally got the courage to even look at my accounts yesterday and I was down about 10%, but no telling what today did to me. I can't look until another rally happens. At the end of the day I think Trump will soon be back to golfing and not giving a fuck instead of trying to be a hero and failing. Probably just wishful thinking.
 
I checked the futures and the S&P is currently down 2 points. I refreshed the page twice to make sure it was accurate as I’ve quickly grown unaccustomed to seeing it +/- a triple digit number.
 
I'm down about 8%. Have a sizable position in the blue chip techs so have really taken it on the chin. Coca-Cola has mitigated some of the pain this last week.
 
I'm down 3% from my yearly high back on 2/25... but I have had 40% in cash paying 4% to offset my widow and orphan stock losses .

I have been an investor for 40 years and this is the first time I've been completely perplexed as to what to do...

go all cash ?
bottom fish to pick up bargains ?
do nothing ?

I think I will follow the advice of the great Merle Haggard and just stay here and drink

 
I'm down 3% from my yearly high back on 2/25... but I have had 40% in cash paying 4% to offset my widow and orphan stock losses .

I have been an investor for 40 years and this is the first time I've been completely perplexed as to what to do...

go all cash ?
bottom fish to pick up bargains ?
do nothing ?

I think I will follow the advice of the great Merle Haggard and just stay here and drink


There's no reason for a bear market other than the daily whims of a nutjob.... but he's a nutjob.
 
My money market is just 3.60 - Ally. I'm seeing some short-term CDs with fantastic rates, like 4.5% for 3 months, 4.5% for 6 months.

Are CD rates going to change soon?
 
My money market is just 3.60 - Ally. I'm seeing some short-term CDs with fantastic rates, like 4.5% for 3 months, 4.5% for 6 months.

Are CD rates going to change soon?
1. Nobody knows. Literally nobody.
2. Chances are short term rates are about as high now as they will be for a while. They're certainly better than most MMs at the moment. If you can really get 4.5% for three months, that's a pretty tempting deal.
 
My money market is just 3.60 - Ally. I'm seeing some short-term CDs with fantastic rates, like 4.5% for 3 months, 4.5% for 6 months.

Are CD rates going to change soon?
I'm in a Fidelity MM paying 4.16% which I have been keeping in a Roth IRA account as a municipal bond proxy that is liquid should there be a total bloodbath in the bond markets.

Will CD rates change ? It all depends upon the whims of the mad king and his eunuchs in Congress.
 
Ooof. Congrats, Trump voters.


Americans are rarely this pessimistic about the economy.

Consumer sentiment plunged 11% this month to a preliminary reading of 50.8, the University of Michigan said in its latest survey released Friday, the second-lowest reading on records going back to 1952. April’s reading was lower than anything seen during the Great Recession.

President Donald Trump’s volatile trade war, which threatens higher inflation, has significantly weighed on Americans’ moods these past few months. That malaise worsened leading up to Trump’s announcement last week of sweeping tariffs, according to the survey.

“This decline was, like the last month’s, pervasive and unanimous across age, income, education, geographic region and political affiliation,” Joanne Hsu, the survey’s director, said in a release.

“Sentiment has now lost more than 30% since December 2024 amid growing worries about trade war developments that have oscillated over the course of the year,” she added.
 
10 year Treasury still rising, nowup to 4.563
If this keeps going uo, Trump will have to cave again or threaten to fire Powell for not lowereing interest rates.
 
As one of the PSA guys said, this is particularly bizarre since Trump won the election five months ago almost entirely because of prices and economic unhappiness. It's as if W responded to 9/11 by giving Osama bin Laden a Medal of Freedom.
 
Books will be written about this. We made it through four of the most challenging years in modern history -- in which a recession was all but guaranteed -- with not just no recession but remarkable GDP growth, low unemployment, and inflation coming back to relatively normal levels. Biden handed Trump one of the strongest economies in recent memory. And now, less than 90 days in, we're teetering on the edge of a deep recession, if not a depression, having squandered not just four years of hard work, but basically 80 years of global economic hegemony. The guy who bags my groceries at Harris Teeter wouldn't have been able to fuck things up this quickly.
 
10 year Treasury still rising, nowup to 4.563
If this keeps going uo, Trump will have to cave again or threaten to fire Powell for not lowereing interest rates.
Oh hell no. Trump would likely appoint Jim Cramer to chair the Fed. Cramer is famous from being on TV (which Trump believes is the ultimate qualification) and he is pals with Navarro.

Seriously, Trump has managed to find the least qualified, most objectionable assholes for basically every job (Kash Patel, RFK Jr, Hegseth, Linda McMahon) so can you imagine him appointing a new Fed chair in the middle of this meltdown?
 
I don't understand this "someone is dumping bonds" narrative. Maybe I'm missing something, but the spike in treasury yields is exactly what economic theory predicts must happen. Has business and financial journalism decided that economics is no longer a prerequisite for those jobs? Here's standard economic theory:

1. trade deficits and capital surpluses are two sides to the same coin. They are literally indistinguishable. When we buy goods from China, they end up with dollars. If they sell their dollars, it plunges the US currency and that's not what China wants. So China uses the dollars to buy US debt (it's sort of like America collectively buys shit from China with installment payments). And that's good, because we have a lot of debt to sell! In fact, there's really no way we would sell our debt without China's involvement.

2. A persistent story in economics -- one that has been fuzzed up a bit in the last two decades but has not been altered in its basics, I don't think -- is that budget deficits create trade deficits. Again, it can't work differently: what is China going to do with all those dollars? It will either sell them, weakening our currency (in which case we will have even more trouble attracting foreign capital, because our yields have to be higher to be competitive), or invest them in treasuries.

3. So the House/Senate this week seem to have agreed on a budget framework that would increase the US debt by a lot. Thus, we are increasing our financing needs by a considerable amount (in part because Trump and the GOP are trying to reduce the financing provided by taxing rich people). But where is that going to come from?

4. The problem is that our trade deficit with China is going to drop close to zero for a little while. That's because trade between the two countries will drop to zero. Normally, the way the trade deficit would close to zero would be dollar depreciation. And that would come from the decreased supply of US debt to purchase. So the process will find an equilibrium.

But today trade is dropping because Trump has more or less decided to make it illegal. That's not supposed to happen in the standard story. So if China no longer has dollars because it's no longer running a trade surplus, they won't buy Treasuries.

In other words, the US government created a $2T financing hole from the increased debt, at the same time it's cutting off our main buyer of debt. The price of that debt has to increase. It just does.

5. So what I see is economics telling us what will happen inevitably. I mean, maybe there's dumping but this isn't a market reacting out of spite. This is a market acting exactly as one would expect.

6. By the way, usually what happens when the government tries to make something happen that doesn't organically happen, the economy adjusts to make it possible. Huge budget deficits and no trade deficits just isn't a feasible combination at our current production levels. The way it can happen is if the US economy enters a deep recession, so that's likely what would happen. US spending has to fall dramatically to make it work.

Note that some of the drop in spending will come from increased savings. Again, somebody has to finance those deficits. If the world isn't going to, Americans will. That's why rates are rising -- Americans don't want to, and they will keep rising until Americans prefer the return from the bond to immediate consumption. All along, money that Americans invest in Treasuries is money that isn't invested in the actual economy. Hence, recession. And recession means lower tax revenues, which means higher deficits, which means . . .

7. This exact process is how Argentina's economy died in the 1950s. One of the more pernicious effects of this economic policy is a decline in private sector investment. Again, it's necessary. So infrastructure crumbles, innovation locates elsewhere, long-term growth stalls. To finance the increasing deficits, the government turns to asset sales (a DOGE specialty), which makes the long-term revenue situation worse.
 
Oh hell no. Trump would likely appoint Jim Cramer to chair the Fed. Cramer is famous from being on TV (which Trump believes is the ultimate qualification) and he is pals with Navarro.

Seriously, Trump has managed to find the least qualified, most objectionable assholes for basically every job (Kash Patel, RFK Jr, Hegseth, Linda McMahon) so can you imagine him appointing a new Fed chair in the middle of this meltdown?
Jim Cramer is too qualified per your accurate second sentence. A better analogy would be Ron Paul.
 
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