@Curves: Haha, i'm doing the same thing. I figure the worst i can do is loose everything, go bankrupt, live on the street begging for spare change and finishing sentances with "God bless".

KronikFpLiOnYkD

@LiquidGravity: wait..

Do you mean the mirrors should fall down or the smoke should fall down?

ideaman2020

Oddly enough I am spending my weekend researching how to set up a brokerage account so I can get in. I know little about investing but I DO know buy low and sell high. The rest I can figure out as I go along.
Screw fear.

Curves

@Noobs-R-Us: Freeze dried, FTW.

johnnyabnormal

When the stock market is doing well there are never an glitches, but when things go to hell the computers go haywire. The computers are alive and definitely toying with us, terminator anyone?

coverofnight

This is what happens when you give a piece of something an artificial value higher than its own worth and then put that artificial value into something digitally artificial and artificially inflate its artificial value.

Its a house of cards made with smoke and mirrors and should fall down.

LiquidGravity

"Sounds ta me like y'allr a couple a bookies..."

Ehrich Blackhound

You better stock up on canned goods now!

Noobs-R-Us

I vote the latter. Screw the stock market.

Lev_Astov

Damn, if only there was a warning that this would happen years ago.

Metropolis anyone?

ILikeMacsWhatAboutIT

"You and your Nobel Prize.. YOU IDIOT!"

UnnDunn

It was the Dukes, It was the Dukes...

Jrsy is the dude, playing the dude, disguised as another dude

@ideaman2020: It isn't smoke. It is Aerogel (TM).

rjp

I'm preparing for the next stage in my career. I think I will make an excellent Squeegee Man and I anticipate a rapid advance through the ranks along with increasing earning potential. I expect that within five years I will have positioned myself for a transition to upper management...

Jrsy is the dude, playing the dude, disguised as another dude

Unless I'm reading this wrong, its not the computers fault that the spike happened. The computers were set to do something buy traders when certain stocks hit a price, they did this, and the effect was a very temporary boost. How is this the computer's fault?

jordo37

@Curves: Good luck. Keep in mind that a few years into the Great Depression the stock market had lost over 90% of its 1929 peak value. So far we've lost about 40% from the peak last year. If credit doesn't resume flowing (or worse, consumer credit starts getting choked off) a Great Depression level event, while unlikely, isn't out of the question.

If I had money sitting around looking for risky bargain investments, I'd actually look at real estate (maybe give it some more time to tank though). RE is a tangible asset that can't be reset to zero at the stroke of a pen. If you own stock in a company that declares bankruptcy, you lose 100% of your investment. If access to commercial credit can't be restored, mass corporate bankruptcies are sure to follow. The problem with RE investing is that people who don't have access to a lot of cash have to get a loan to buy the property, and loans to people without a lot of cash are pretty scarce right now. This is partly why the rich always get richer.

superbad

I hate your stocks, and I'm a PC.

Kaiser-Machead's LEGO WALL-E

Someone here should google "limit order." This is not news. In other news, water is wet.

Matt83

I can imagine a scenario where, in better times, a company hires a financial model guru to write programs to buy stocks under certain conditions. Then when the economy goes bad they fire him, not knowing they are about to buy up a couple million shares of a failing bank.

misterwho

@Kaiser-Machead's LEGO WALL-E: Stocks hate my retirement accounts, and I'm a PC.

shamoononon has a hebetudinous dog

@Curves: True, but no one can be sure this is the bottom. IMO, it'll be a good time to buy when the oscillations become less severe.

nickexperience

@Curves: This is why I like you. Because you're smart.

Never panic sell. No one ever got rich by buying high and selling low. As they say on Wall Street, "don't try to catch a falling knife".

Personally, I might buy some Ford and GM (as much as I make fun of their stock for being in Happy Meals now). Both are "too big to fail".

OMG! Ponies!

I'm ok for now but I just hope that if this thing gets much worse, that my credit card, car loan, and student loan don't all of a sudden come due in full or else I'll be out on the street looking for change myself.

fsusmithc2

@Noobs-R-Us: So Frozen Orange Juice Concentrate would be a good idea?

Git Em SteveDave loves this guy-->

@johnnyabnormal: Flavor is in the can.

CYST!

Who says we have to trade stocks by the second anyway? It's obvious even with (because of?) today's technology that doing so is inherently dangerous. Look at what happened to United. An old, cached bankruptcy story was dug up, mislabeled, and brought the company's stock tumbling before anyone noticed it was incorrect information.

Don't get me wrong. I believe a company's assets should be as publicly manageable as possible. However, I think a little more control and order in the world of stocks would go a long way to alleviating stock crashes based on panicky and misinformed investors.

blackmage439

@rjp:
@ideaman2020:

And here I thought that I would confuse people with the 'artificial' stuff.

LiquidGravity

I say we just let computers run the whole thing. And also we water our plants with Brawndo, it's got what plants crave.

anonymousryan

@LiquidGravity: They aren't confused.

They're mocking you.

tex1ntux

@Lev_Astov: I second that.

RE-L

About a year ago I sold my last remaining stocks and got the hell out of the market. Now I'm waiting for this sucker to bottom out so I can get in on some discounted stocks.

LoganAdams

@Matt83:

Thank you. I was just about to post that. A drop like that would set a LOT of limit orders off all at once, and by the time everyone realized it, the sellers took advantage of it.

For any who got screwed, next time you might want to try a stop limit order (fixed price)... as in once the price triggers, it WILL NOT fill at the market price, but at the limit price you established with the order.

For example, if you put in an order:
BUY +100 SPY @ $90.01 STOPLIMIT $85.00, then it would try and fill at $85.00 once the price was lower than $90.01, but not fill at the $90.00 market price.

Another tip: DON'T USE EVEN NUMBERED AND MENTAL PRICE POINTS FOR LIMIT ORDERS!

For example:
Bad: BUY +100 SPY @ $90.00
Better: BUY +100 SPY @ $90.03

Why? Because everyone else is making limit orders at nice even numbers. You would much rather get triggered above that point to avoid being in a massive sell-off crowd at $90.00 which will further drive the price down and blow through your limit order. Play it safe. This is also true for .25, .50, .75, etc.

UnStatusTheQuo

@Noobs-R-Us: LOL funny you mention it- wasnt Cambell the only stock that went up?

2001gsr

@Curves: Um, if you don't know what you're doing, just get a S&P 500 index fund and just do monthly/quarterly purchases. the index fund tracks the overall market, so it will be down for quite some time. If you do regular purchases, though, you can average out the purchase price over time. We all know that the market is not going back up anytime soon, so you might as well get a good deal while the market is crappy...

anti-hello-kitty

@OMG! Ponies!: "Never panic sell. No one ever got rich by buying high and selling low. As they say on Wall Street, 'don't try to catch a falling knife'".

You should re-examine your understanding of that phrase. It means "wait until you've seen sustained positive price movement and indicators before buying." If Curves were to buy in now, she would be trying to catch a falling knife in the truest sense. Wait until it stabilizes.

svnt

@CSX321: Hmm... Why did my reply not get indented?

CSX321

@Curves: I'm thinking about moving some of my money into mortgage-backed securities. Despite the assumption that they are the problem, if you look at the facts, they are actually one of the few things still making money. Granted it's only about 2.5%, but that beats the -32.5% my IRA has "made" so far this year.

CSX321

@svnt: GM announced earlier today that it is not declaring bankruptcy. Would you buy a car from a company that declared bankruptcy. GM doesn't think so either. Which is why they won't do it. Personally, I don't think that Congress would let it.

Both GM and Ford are being dragged down by their credit divisions.

GM is at around $4 - $5. Ford is around $2. It is not realistically possible for it to go much lower. These are historic lows for major stocks. Buy 'em now and sit on them. The knife is on the floor. It's not falling any more. (and even a large drop would be only 25c - it's a buyer's market on two excellent long-term stocks.)

OMG! Ponies!

@OMG! Ponies!: This is what I am talking about. I made not be a trader, but I have a calculator and know that both of those companies assets, even sold for scrap, are worth more than $5. If you buy @ $5, hang onto them say 2 years and they go only back as far as $10 (which in the long run is a pretty low expectation) we are STILL talking a huge return. People who are buying and selling in the short term time frame hoping to kill on the trade seem to be the ones losing now. I can hold my wad longer than that (pardon the expression).

Curves

I thought that it bottomed out on the day they announced the bail out so I waited a couple of days and bought into a mutual fund with a great history. Woops.

reddingofish

I imagine a future when computer algorithms determine the economy and people are left out of the equation.

Chewbenator

@Matt83: While it's not truly a glitch, I think it's still somewhat newsworthy since a lot of the wild see-sawing of the market today, especially in the first and last hours, may be caused by this type of stuff.

In the last hour, I saw the DJIA down 300, up 300, down, up again, then closed down. The first hour was even wilder. And a third of the total volume was within the last hour.

TVGenius

@anonymousryan: It's got electrolytes!

Staisey

@fsusmithc2: Check the legalise that you agreed to. The lender can never make the loan or note due in full once it has been disbursed as long as you have a good payment history. They can sell your loan to another lender, and you pay them from now on, but they can't just change your repayment schedule.

geowrian

Seriously, all the stock market in the world should suspend till the new president of United States is elected. Stock Markets will keep crashing as long as Bush is still in da house

SpiffySteve

Looking good, Lewis!

jonparent

@anonymousryan: It'll make your plants feel like they're riding a pony, except the pony is 300 feet tall and covered in chainsaws!

SomeoneUKno

@Curves: you my friend, are one of the few people in America that more need to follow. Short-term gains are more subject to fail compared to long-term and this is where traders get greedy hoping to make a profit on the fly. In order to sustain the economy, investments are needed. If you pick the right stocks and hold-em long enough, you are bound to see great returns. The point is that simple, really, but too many people can't seem to understand this very basic fact. And that's why the market is going to the dumps right now.

unztopable

@unztopable: Thnx, I think. I actually did open that brokerage account this morning too. Welcome to Wall Street Baby.

Curves