The Stock Market

jesus christ, the era of 24-hour news and twitchily updated newspaper 'front pages' online has really found its level with this crash. a couple of hours ago the guardian main story was "FTSE rebounds after blah blah blah". i went to the opticians, came back, and now its "FTSE dips in red". what is the fucking point of this minute-by-minute analysis, especially for a non-specialist paper.

Surely there's more point in minute-by-minute analysis for things that are acutely time-sensitive like this? As opposed to, say, 'factory blows up in Stoke, police still don't know anything'.

Not that the Guardian website would exactly be the first point of call for anyone seeking up to date financial information but still...

So tits up or not?

well now it says:

"Markets brace for more turmoil
Last updated 11 minutes ago
Investors and pensions holders should prepare for further stock market volatility, traders warn."

i think the 'volatility'-ness of it is the clue that the headline should be 'volatile market is volatile' until it can be called.

Making a song and dance about everything and anything is what the meeja's all about these days

word on the street is there's a RECESSION on the horizon (this sib-prime thing being the straw breaking the camel's back) and d!ck all we can do about it...

sub-prime

i'd like it very much if prime-rib caused recessions ...

also, urgent & key -- DON'T PAY ANY MIND TO 24/7 FINANCIAL JOURNALISM. it's even more useless than 24/7 political journalism or even celebrity journalism!

word on the street is there's a RECESSION on the horizon (this sib-prime thing being the straw breaking the camel's back) and d!ck all we can do about it...

-- CarsmileSteve, Friday, August 17, 2007 12:33 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

indeed. who could have seen it coming?

There's always a recession somewhere...usually when you are trying to find a good new job or ask for a pay rise.

I like how the government has said absolutely dick all so far.

Not much they can do about it... or say about it

yeah, brown needs to put on some wellies, get over to threadneedle street, and burn some of mopes responsible.

ooh! ooh!

Markets surge after US cuts key interest rate
Last updated four minutes ago
Federal Reserve steps in to calm world stock market jitters.

pfft, they already effectively did that by releasing all of those reserves over the past week.

it won't save anything, IMHO.

We're doomed to fuck.

but pete the guardian says 'markets surge' four minutes ago! what could possibly go wrong?

and they're OFFFFFFFFF -- nasdaq opened up over 2%, s&p and the dow over 1%.

this shit is kinda like watching crackheads smoking it up.

Seems to me that the Fed is rly nervous

tripping over its words, knocking things over. buck up, fed!

i'm actually kinda pissed off about this -- if they make the deposit to my 401(k) today (as they should), then i'm buying HIGH ;_;

what's funny is that one day the dow does well, the papers all go "economy is great! ignore the naysayers!", then the next day it plunges 300 points and it's "1987 all over again??!?!??" then the next day it surges, etc. etc. etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder

what's funny is that one day the dow does well, the papers all go "economy is great! ignore the naysayers!", then the next day it plunges 300 points and it's "1987 all over again??!?!??" then the next day it surges, etc. etc. etc.

100% of what the financial presses say is designed to sell papers. Maybe 20% of this overlaps with what's actually useful and/or accurate.

And that's not even to mention the way the non-financial press covers the economy.

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/crack-15.jpg

I only have 401ks and IRAs. I'm not going to see that money for 40 years.

fed reserve and european central bank = the cash money brothers.

i cant see how this, when it plays out, is merely a recession

In Praise of a Virtual Crash

The interesting element in the tragicomedy on the stock exchanges in recent months is the uncertainty as to whether a catastrophe has occurred. Has there been a 'real' catastrophe? Will there be one? The answer is: the catastrophe is a virtual one, and there will be no real catastrophe because we live under the sign of virtual catastrophe. This is connected with a state of affairs which was shown up strikingly here: the discrepancy between the fictional economy and the real economy. It is this discrepancy which protects us from a real catastrophe of the productive economies. Is this a good or a bad thing? It is exactly the same as the discrepancy between orbital wars and land wars. Land wars go on everywhere, but nuclear war has not broken out. If the two were not disconnected, the nuclear confrontation would have erupted long since. We are dominated by bombs and virtual catastrophes which do not explode: the international stock market crash (this has not really eventuated and it will not), nuclear war, the third-world debt, and even the demographic time-bomb. One could, of course, argue that all these things will inevitably blow up in our faces one day, just as there has long been a prediction that, within the next fifty years, an earthquake will surely see California slide into the Pacific. But the facts are clear: we are in the situation where the catastrophe does not eventuate; in a situation of virtual catastrophe -- eternally virtual catastrophe.

This is how things are for us; it is the only reality objectively facing us: a wild, orbital round-dance of capital which, when it breaks down, produces no substantial disequilibrium in real economies (unlike the 1929 Crash, when the fictional and the real economies were by no means as disconnected, and, as a result, the catastrophe within the one had an impact on the other), either because real economies are themselves so speculative that they absorb more easily today what they could not absorb in 1929, or because the sphere of virtual capital has become so autonomous, so orbitalized, that it can in some cases proliferate -- or even devour itself -- without leaving any trace. It does, however, leave at least one catastrophic trace: the crash that has occurred has not been so much in the economy as in economic theory, which is now at a total loss before this explosion of its object. For everything has become a problem of communication. In the orbital sphere of capital, there is wonderfully good communication (the perverse computers and the 'golden boys,' who are themselves computing machines). This is the reason why it is in a permanently catastrophic state: the communications are too good. On the other hand, between the two spheres (of the virtual and the real), there is no longer any communication. Fortunately or otherwise. For it is this break between the two, this loss of a referent on the part of the virtual economy, which enables it to produce prodigious effects, but it is also this which protects the real economy from the catastrophes which may occur in the other sphere.

...There was, admittedly, a crisis in 1929, and an explosion at Hiroshima, and hence there was a moment when these two worlds explosively contaminated each other, a moment when the economic slump and nuclear warfare were real, but we should not be misled by this as to what was to follow. Capital has not lurched from one crisis to another, each worse than the last (as Marx argued it would), nor have we lurched from one war to another. The event took place once and that is all. What came after was something quite different: it was the hyper-realization of big finance capital, the hyper-realization of overkill capacity, both orbitalized above our heads and of course quite beyond our grasp, and a course which is, fortunately, also beyond the grasp of reality itself. Hyper-realized war and hyper-realized money circulate in an inaccessible space, but in doing so they leave the world just as it is. In the end, the economies continue to produce, whereas the tiniest logical consequence of the fluctuations in the fictional economy would long ago have sufficed to wipe them out (let us not forget that in the daily figures for international trade, only 100 billion dollars goes on commercial transactions, while capital movements stand at 900 billion).

...When the debt becomes too burdensome we expel it into a virtual space, where it appears as a catastrophe frozen in orbit. The debt becomes a satellite of the earth, just as war has become a satellite of the earth, just as the billions of dollars of speculative capital have become a satellite-heap, revolving endlessly around the planet. And it is, no doubt, better that it should be that way. While they are revolving -- and even if they should explode in space (as the billions 'lost' in the 1987 crash did) -- the world is not changed by them, and this is the best we can hope for. The 'rational' hope of reconciling the fictional and real economies is entirely utopian: these billions of dollars exist only virtually; they cannot be transposed into the real economy. And a good thing too, for if they could by some miracle be re-injected into the production economies, that would spell real catastrophe. ...

-- Jean Baudrillard
March 2, 1988

wow he kind of recycled that "INVISIBLE CRASH/WAR" thing, no? baudrillard has the bullshitting skills that could have earned him serious bank in the city.

i cant see how this, when it plays out, is merely a recession

It's almost like you're looking forward to it ;)

The Sun comments box on all this is very entertaining right now.

Sell hell on Black Thursday
Why should people lose money because these spotty little stockbrokers have wet their nappies? These people are grossly overpaid parasites who have never done a day's work in their lives, so how on earth can they judge the performance of businesses where people really work?

baudrillard has the bullshitting skills that could have earned him serious bank in the city.

he woulda been great on the stand too. "your honor my next witness will demonstrate conclusively that the money my clients lost did not even exist."

recession????

woohoo i put loads of money in savings accounts and stuff

does that mean i'll be able to afford to buy a house soon?

is that how it works?

i'm fascinated by this whole stocks/shares thing, esp the spate of articles in sunday papers about the horrors of it all. but i dont really understand what it is, or how it works - can someone recommend an idiots guide to the whole thing?

and also a good book by say some 80s wall street guy who lived highs/lows, made millions, lost it all, etc

What's your most successful investment?

I've had my share of quick doubles and triples as a penny stock trader, but nothing that approaches a stock that I put my friend in, it was QBID, this was late '03, I got him in at .0001 and in 2 days it began moving up and was at .035 in a week. He invested a whopping $150 which would have been worth over $50,000 except he sold it the day after he bought it, for breakeven. I think in the entire index of pennies and pinksheet stocks there's only been like 2 that have exceeded that performance since.

haha, if the dude didn't sell at the right time, that's not "performance" at all!

I mean that's a little like saying "My most successful investment ever was that time I thought about buying IBM before it got huge"

can someone recommend an idiots guide to the whole thing?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61W6GM8VD7L._AA240_.jpg

oh noodle you are a one.

anyone got better suggestions?

James Cramer, Confessions of a Street Addict

a good book by say some 80s wall street guy who lived highs/lows, made millions, lost it all, etc

Victor Niederhoffer, Education of a Speculator actually fits that description more accurately (made/lost billions) but Cramer's book is a much snappier read.

yeah but jim cramer is a bastard

OTM freakshow

there are several good or at least interesting recommendations on barry ritholtz's site. I really am a slobbering bigpicture fanboy at this point. he should sell t-shirts.

Dailyspeculations.com for models + charts + spec musings galore.

To specs, "value trading" is a huge diss.

I'm a macro guy though. I put my money in mutual funds by sector and use spider/index funds as my "hedges." I don't have the time or the inclination to be a serious trader, especially with all the nasty stories I keep reading from my macro sources etc. what's the old stat, private traders only do 85% as well as the indices?

("Uneducated" as in illiterate about monetary matters.)

Oof, those meme stocks a few posts up, then vs. now. ^^

Everything I hate about the stock market summed up in a single headline on CNN today: "Stocks tumble after better-than-expected jobs report."

I understand the dynamic: more jobs = inflation = stocks tumble. It's still intuitively bizarre.

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/zfj761/recently_discovered_the_majority_of_my_parents/