OT: Stock Market Watch, Q2 2018
 

This is a serious thread, only to discuss the ups and downs of the stock market.

Please keep it on topic: previous editions of this thread have been shut down due to trolling or off-topic unfunny puns or similar shenanigans, comments like those are not welcome here. Neither are political comments or jabs. Off topic and unwelcome.

Sadly these threads tend to bring out the trolls, yesterday's thread was shut down due to trolling within hours. Again, please refrain from posing off topic posts in this thread, including political commentary. Mods, please take note and ban offenders.


Down 722 yesterday, another 425 today .

:eek: :bike: :help:

The issues with the market currently are primarily "Trade War" fears and the effect on earnings.
Unfortunately, to discuss this will only evolve into a political discussion, which will cause the thread to be closed, and it will be impossible to ignore this for the current market.

I admire the tenacity, but it is impossible to discuss market movements like this without the broader geopolitical context that's sparking the market movements.

Tariffs and trade wars are the stuff o' politics man.

But sure, the numbers moved.

He who shall not be named took credit for the rise, so lets see if he steps up to the fall that is sure to come.

I'm worried that this is just the beginning. It seems like in a lot of ways we still haven't fully recovered from the last crash.

I blame Di2 headline selling, a.k.a. macro electronic trading.

That said, the S&P 500 PE is, for example, is pretty rich of late.

If your retirement time horizon is now, that blows. It's a perfect storm of declining equities & rising rates.

The 10 year has ruined many a fixed income asset managers' days lately.

In olden days, recessions led to a drop in the stock market. Now, because of our blind faith in the so called 'wealth effect', we must never allow markets to drop because it might lead to a recession. It is bizzaro world. You'll probably hear some jaw boning this weekend from some lackie of the Fed talking about how they may slow the pace of rate hikes this year.

It will really depend on how/if China retaliates to the 50 billion in Trade Tariffs and Other Penalties .
So far, not too much, but if they step it up, and reduce their investment in US Treasuries, then, yes, this is just the beginning.

Huh?? DOW is up 400+% since the `08 Crash.

Yeah, and real median incomes have barely moved. We've saddled future generations with an additional $10 trillion in debt, and too big to fail banks are even more systematically important.

The Dow is an index of 30 huge companies, but hardly a relevant yardstick for measuring anything except for expectations about their future profits; let alone how robust the overall economy is.

To Matt and other's point, the issue with the recovery is that it feels uneven and artificial, that a reckoning still exists underneath the Fed's unprecedented support of the economy (and central banks globally more generally) over the last decade.

Their balance sheets exploded in size to keep cheap money in the system. What happens to the system when that firehose turns into a garden hose?

I agree that from `08 to `15 the economy was not recovering from the `08 crash, however, the past few years has seen the economy improving.
And yes, the DOW is only 30 large companies, but the S&P 500 in the last 10 years has risen from its `08 crash low of 666 to 2,588

The stock market is not the economy and vice versa.

I know, then why are you bringing the economy up in the "OT: Stock Market Watch, Q2 2018" thread? ;)

This is why my portfolio is nothing but BitCoin and Lukoil.