Crazy week in the markets

[Russ Smith]

Monday markets were way down, Tues way up, and today even more way down.

Individual stocks are acting so weird there's speculation of market manipulation being discussed on Bloomberg and elsewhere.

I have 2 stocks that announced earnings after the bell last night, both beat across the board, and upped their guidance. One was up 5% after hours, the other 8%. Today the first one is down 4%, the second one is down almost 9%! There's no new information out but one of those companies that does short selling reports has apparently targeted both of them, I Robot(IRBT) and Illumina(ILMN) and issued old reports, again, and there's a big sell off of both.

There's some speculation shorts are actively targeting stocks recommended by Motley Fool because those 2 and Shopify have all recently been hit by short seller reports and all 3 are recommended by MF.

A guy on Bloomerg said it's crazy, if I were an investor I'd buy all 3 stocks based on facts but given they shouldn't be falling now, there's no way to know how much more they could fall.

 

[thirty-two]

I threw in 100 bucks into my Robinhood acct recently just to try out stocks and I’ve already lost about 10 bucks, lol. I was up $5 but this week just demolished Two of the three stocks I picked. But anyway, it’s for the long haul of course. I much prefer my index funds.

 

[Russ Smith]

I threw in 100 bucks into my Robinhood acct recently just to try out stocks and I’ve already lost about 10 bucks, lol. I was up $5 but this week just demolished Two of the three stocks I picked. But anyway, it’s for the long haul of course. I much prefer my index funds.

I've been buying individual stocks the last year and doing really well because the markets were all up, but this week has not been good.

indexes are definitely safer, I have those too. I've also been buying stocks that pay dividends as a hedge against the markets falling. I scaled back a bit last week on stocks but not enough to offset today. I actually debated buying an ETF that shorted one of the markets as a hedge but didn't, the one I was going to buy is up 2% today but those things are really scary to hold on to very long.

The markets have been up for so long a fall seems inevitable and today in addition to all the Trump nonsense, we have the North Korea Hydrogen bomb comments pushing the markets down.

Today is one of those days where only people short are in a good mood

 

[Russ Smith]

Brutal day even with the strong close. 2 of my 24 stocks or funds went up, the other 22 down and IRBT ended up down 13% from the downgrade by the short selling firm.

 

[Russ Smith]

This might be the craziest week I can recall that did not involve being in a recession. Wed my 2 IRA's with Fidelity just absolutely tanked. I lost more money in that one day than I'd earned in the entire month of October and remember we had a stretch of I think 7 days in a row where the markets were up.

Thursday the markets were up and I gained back just over half of that loss.

Today if the markets closed right now, I'd have earned more money today, than I lost Wed, largely due to Amazon and Intel having such good earnings reports.

 

[BillsCarnage]

No rhyme or reason to it anymore. Most earnings, generally, seem to be doing better than estimates which is good.

But, overall

 

[Russ Smith]

No rhyme or reason to it anymore. Most earnings, generally, seem to be doing better than estimates which is good.

But, overall

Yeah Friday was amazing for me. I wound up making back all the money I lost Wed, and about 40% more.

This was all earnings driven, with the Dow I'm not really sure what's still driving it, I think low interest rates are a big factor. There's just not too many obvious safe places to put money because CD's and money markets are paying so low so peole are continuing to buy stocks?

 

[AZCB34]

I believe if you look back to the tech bubble time period, right before that bubble burst there was alot of whip sawing around daily/weekly.

This market is over heated and is about due for a correction.

 

[Russ Smith]

I believe if you look back to the tech bubble time period, right before that bubble burst there was alot of whip sawing around daily/weekly.

This market is over heated and is about due for a correction.

It's been due for a long time. I really don't think the market is going to correct because it's so high, I think some event, North Korea, Russia Investigation, something like that will eventually trigger a downturn in the market.

Interest rates are just too low, real estate is a bubble if you don't already own, so if people want to invest, the market is just about the only choice.

I scaled back a bit on Monday and sold some of my lesser performing stocks there's just so many potential catalysts out there right now, most of them dependent on Donald Trump, so I think it's inevitable eventually he does something to trigger a drop in the markets