I Survived The Great Bear Market of 10/10

A note about the stock market on this wonderful October day, 2018.

I imagine all the young techies seeing the markets today.

In New York City and San Francisco, they are checking their portfolios saying, “damn Netflix actually went down today?”

“Wait a second, the Nasdaq can fall that much?”

If you’re 29-years-old, your first job started in 2011 or 2012. That means you did not start really saving until a few more years after that. It’s at that point you began investing. It’s at that point you probably really started to pay attention to markets. And that’s where today’s sell-off is historic.

I don’t remember what I was doing in 2011. Do you? I’m sitting back and trying to think through it.

An entire generation of new investors saw their first big drop today. It also happened in the sector they love: tech. Think Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Square, and all the biggest names sprawled across the current generation’s iPhone. The landscape of young and inexperienced investors is interested in buying names generations before them do not understand. Most of these happen to be categorized as tech companies. Most of them were pulverized from 9:30 AM ET until 4:00 PM ET today. Some were hit even harder in after-hours.

I don’t know if this is the start of a wider sell-off. No one ever really knows. But I do know, for many in this age group, today was the first big sell-off they’ve seen in their young investing careers across the basket of stocks they’ve handpicked themselves. I think that’s worth noting, and worth talking about the next time you and your friends get together to chat about markets.

That’s all for now. I’ll leave you with this:

Note: I see a lot of you tweeting at me, “but Young FinTwit what about the election drop? Or that other thing?” Let’s be real, this entire generation prefers tech. On this day, tech was obliterated. Obliterated to the point of something no one in this generation has seen in a single day.

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