I notice that there are many commenters here offering opinions on the future price of equities. Note that nobody has any idea where equity prices will be in one day, never mind one year or ten years' time. As a retail investor (i.e. not extremely rich), you can't gain any advantage over the market that overcomes your transaction costs.

So relax. There's nothing to do here. If you're contributing to a retirement fund, keep buying. As the market falls, you're getting a discount. If you need to retire in the next five years, you should already have started moving out of equities. It's too late to change that now.

Slightly unrelated, but why does the stock market close each night? If trading was open 24/7, we wouldn't have large spikes like this every morning. We'd only have them when certain news is announced.

Just to clarify the title:

Trading was halted for 15 minutes.

It was not that long ago that the "experts" were saying the Boom-Bust Cycle had ended. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-22/bridgewat...

Buffett, Dalio and others have been preparing for this time for a while.

This is when money is made or lost. If you have the ability and the stomach for it. I'm not suggesting you buy today, I personally don't believe the worst is behind us. But an opportunity is coming.

So, children of summer (there are many here who have only known the longest bull market in the last century), let me give you some free advice.

If you're looking at this and wondering when to get in, to bargain hunt essentially, and you're asking yourself questions like "today? next week?", you need to step back and think again. Some points to consider:

- If your time horizon is 10+ years out probably none of this matters

- If your time horizon is less than 5 years out, you should really question if you should be in the stock market at all

- Be familiar with the term "dead cat bounce". This is a temporary period of recovery followed by a steeper drop. You're going to see this kind of thing.

- Large market drops often lead to or are because of a likely recession. This can go on for months or years.

- After the GFC the markets went down and then sideways for over a year. You essentially missed nothing by waiting two years. This could easily happen again.

- Learn what "reversion to mean" means. It means that at times the markets generally follow a long term upward trend. At times the market will go above or below that. This can be a useful indicator of whether equities are cheap or expensive. In a given cycle you have boom (above the mean when equities are overbought) to bust (an overcorrection to below the mean when equities are oversold).

Bear markets are paved with the blood of optimists.

For reference, someone might want to post a chart of the gains the markets have made in the past 5 years. I would hardly call this a crash.

Genuine question: They can just do that ? Issue a trading halt because they don't like the direction it's going ?

> “There’s a reason why they have those circuit breakers -- it’s to give people time to come back from panicked feelings,”

Seems strange that the market is kinda able to be manipulated like that. I'm not saying this is a bad move, just surprised that someone can do it.

Trade safe. Historic times. Wouldn't be surprised if all the volatility shorts blow up and the S&P goes down 20% in a session.

Buy S&P puts as a hedge to save your account in times of extreme volatility.

I had 270 strike puts for April I bought on Friday for $6 that jumped to $15 today and got my account to break even even though the value of my stocks went down.

The one takeaway I learned from 2007 is to buy puts when I feel like there is going to be a recession. It may just give me enough money to last a year or two if I lose my job.

Starting last week, I bought a put (just 1) in Chipotle (No particular reason, I just picked a random one) for 2000.

Its the one bet I hope I lose money on, but so far my position (2k investment) have grown to over 6k. (300% increase).

Its sad money because when the market goes down, my RSUs are dropping significantly more. The put are there to make sure if I lose my job and my RSUs, my put position will generate enough profits to last me 2 years without work. I only need 24k to get by / year.

Just wanted to put this out there in case someone else out there has alot of RSUs that are stuck and wanted to buy some positions to make some money in case of a recession.

For those unaware, this is common practice -- it a control that is working as intended. The trading was halted for 15 minutes

How valid is it to look to the past when there is so much cash floating around? With so much more demand for roi, I would think that in itself would bias the markets up. Almost like an invisible Keynesian injection eager to happen

I wonder how different things would be if instead of those stepped halts, a super high granular delay is injected into the system. Like instead of halting, making it go on but in "slow-motion". And depending on the strength of the drop, the slow-motion factor to inject in the system.

I say this because halting tries to "cool down" emotion but it still "feels like" panic while making it all go slow would "feel kind of crappy yet normal" hence "buying" time to cool things down while still working.

Wouldn't that reward going up and penalize/protect going down?

(I'm not a trader) if I wanted to watch the market with a near-real-time dashboard, does that exist?

The fact that these controls on the stock market have been triggered reinforces my doubts that our current "profits and growth over sustainability" view of how public companies should operate is in any way good.

Short of a huge change in COVID-19's mortality rate, few if any of these businesses will go under in the next year naturally. The fire sale of stocks due to short-term impacts to revenue, however, just might do what COVID-19 can't.

This will be blamed on COVID-19, but the problems go much deeper. Last year the Fed lost control of the repo market. the event was widely discounted at the time as an end-of-tax-year fluke. It wasn't. Six month ago, the yield curve inverted. People who should have known better said "this time is different."

Speculators have been trained over the course of 10+ years to buy the dip. The Fed has your back.

What we're seeing is the beginning of the end of that resolve.

The last time this happened was during the GFC. It's not normal, and it's probably not a one-time event, either.

Despite all the blood, I see a bull case for Tech and the USA. In the last 5 years:

1- The Nasdaq has gained 99.77% until it's peak. It has corrected by 17.41% since the peak. Total gains till today: 64.9%.

2- The Dow Jones has gained 65% till the peak. Corrected by 21.71% since then. Total gains till today: 35.85%.

3- CAC 40 has gained 20% in the last 5 years till the peak. Corrected by 22.12% in this sell-off. Total returns are -6%.

My thoughts:

- Tech used to go up more and down more. Now it went up more and down less. This is likely to encourage and push traditional investors to invest more in tech. They were afraid from tech because of the bloody downturns. Now tech holds better in a downturn, so that argument is no longer there.

- Europe is likely to be hit harder from this crisis since they rely a lot on Tourism. That means a harder recession. Europe tech sector is weak and unlikely to match its American counterpart growth in a EU slowdown.

- China might be the biggest loser in this. The world might realize we are depending too much on China. The US government might force company to build locally or outsource to friendlier countries they want to boost. China is not going to the dark ages but might face a slow down; though a social revolution is definitely not out of the question.

- The oil crisis, if prolonged, is going to change some countries. Look at Venezuela. Russia, Middle East, Algeria, Canada, etc... These countries might face budget challenges they have never been through before if oil goes below $20 for an extended time.

- The US tech sector being the only good-yield field and becoming a safe haven for investment in a world of worry and chaos will boom into a bubble of untold proportions.

Disclaimer: Not a professional advice. Might lose part of your money or all of your capital. Might be a total hopium from someone is the tech sector seeing lots of red today.

This is creating one of the best buy opportunity ever. It's just sad that only the rich will benefit. The poor will just get poorer.

> The cash equities market is subject to circuit breakers established by the New York Stock Exchange in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday crash. Trading will halt for 15 minutes if the S&P 500 falls 7% to 2,764.3 at any time before 3:25 p.m. in New York. ...

That's less than a 1% drop from here.

Right now, all eyes are on the Fed and the size of the bazooka they'll be deploying.

Anything short of outright stock purchases is not going to be received well. Despite the desperation that move smells like, the Fed would be merely following ground already trodden by the Bank of Japan, which now owns around 80% of the Japanese ETF market.

Edit: only 5 points to go.

I don't know if it was a good bet but I moved all my 401k into money market accounts for the time being last Thursday. I feel like those who say I should ride the wave down are probably not telling me the truth. All indicators seem to suggest a 25% correction or more before the end of the year.

I've been buying stocks heavily on the latest dips and so far that is all down around 20%. I diversified investments in cruises, airlines, real estate, banks, tech and more. It feels like 2008 is happening all over again.

first time since the 2016 U.S. presidential election after they fell more than the daily limit of 5%

I would recommend anyone looking for long term guidance about what comes next read this article from Bloomberg's excellent John Authers.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-09/oil-cr...

Considering most wealth is in old peoples hands, they are most affected by this virus. They are most susceptible to fear-mongering too.

Like others have said, this was just a 15 minute halt when the Dow/S&P 500 dipped to -7%. This can happen again at -13% and trading will flat out stop at -20% [1]

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/circuitbreaker.asp

US stock trade (artificial) limits might have existed before but I don’t remember them. You see these in other countries and commodity markets. Limit down. IMO they cause a faster drop in a down market because you don’t know when you’ll be able to exit. The market can open limit down within seconds. This can continue for weeks.

The market was up over 30% last year, but GDP growth was certainly not 30%.

A lot of comments are saying that a recession is probable.

Can anyone shed a light on why that is/could be the case?

Serious question, is anyone watching this carefully and trying to determine when things will bottom out (perhaps in a week or two), to buy stocks, ETFs, and such at the bottom of the dip?

Hindsight is 20:20 of course, but there's a number of equities that one could have purchased shortly after the 2008 financial crisis that proceeded to make significant gains between 2009 and 2019.

To be honest , the market was in dire need for correction, BUT wonder where we will be when companies starts reporting their quarterly results and impact of that.

So far this looked more like a correction than a precursor to the recession. To make things worse, OPEC dropped bombs which spread the wildfire further..

In a world with zero-to-negative interest rates, unlimited margin available for the big players and a generation of boomers sold on the idea that stock appreciation (not dividends) is going to fund their retirement, what's the value of any company? Who knows?

Until dividends are tax advantaged vs. capital gains, the insanity will continue. Leverage, huge risks and various shades of fraud, rather than responsible business stewardship will continue to dominate the financial system.

It seems to me that falling 7% is qualitatively different from opening down 7%. Oil fell 30% over the weekend because of OPEC issues, and it seems like this could just be a response to that. "Plunge" implies a sort of velocity (as opposed to falling 7% over several days) which wasn't really the case here.

Is there any evidence that a temporary trading halt will help to stabilize the market?

Currently only 6% down, perhaps (anecdotal) evidence that halts work?

how is this "circuit breaker" meant to help? surely it will just fuel emotions and make things worse if people can't get rid of stock they don't want?

And if the media would stop writing alarmist articles, there would be far less panic. We're in the golden age of yellow journalism. I've learned, in general, panicking creates more problems than there were to begin with.

My first thought was the dead cat bounce from last week.

Hang onto your butts...

Bloomberg has view limits now? https://outline.com/7grdK6

Already blow past 7% on downside.

vix is approaching GFC levels - good time to sell some delta neutral condors

It seems Mr. Market doesn't get to visit as freely or stay as long as he likes sometimes.

It did the trick. Everyone is talking about it and my friends are buying.

TLT,GLD buy buy buy

Asia sneezes and America gets a cold...

#hodl

Let's call it what it is, the start of the Trump recession. Move your money to FDIC insured if you value it.

Free market - until it is not

But buy buy. All long term investors should be buying here imo. I’m not a big player but I’m picking up some shares at these lows.

Well, according to a Harvard epidemiologist, 40-70% of humans will contract this virus, which implies 120-168 million people will die. That's going to impact economic activity and so will a Saudi / Russian oil price war. It's going to lead to the dreaded "R"-word and usually sinks whomever happens to be the current POTUS and their chances for re-election.