What are we going to do without Dodd Frank protecting middle Class investors?
Everything this person writes about in this article is likely true. However, when the government gets rid of everything that protects middle Class to poor investors by getting rid of Dodd-Frank Bill like Trump is presently trying to do, it is only a matter of time when the lack of protections destroy all the "little guys" and benefits only the super rich who can afford to let their money stay and grow for years through all the ups and downs of the markets.
The people who just cannot afford a long down turn and have to sell at a loss are the ones who lose "everything" in a crash not the very rich who might just stay in until their stocks recover. So, you have to be able to afford to LIVE without that money until it recovers which means you are already upper middle Class to rich to begin with. Because the last recovery you sort of were waiting from 2009 until 2013 or 2014 when it was practical to maybe begin to cash in if you needed to. Just remember in the Great recession the market hit around 6500 then.
So, part of the trick is to have enough out into cash to survive those times. That is the trick and not everyone is rich enough to do that.
1 day ago ... Each modern stock-market crash has been precipitated by a catalyst ... Opinion: We're not smart enough to spot a coming stock-market crash.
Opinion: We’re not smart enough to spot a
Each modern stock-market crash has been precipitated by a catalyst that has little to do with finance
Orion/courtesy Everett Collection
By
ScottNations
The
psychology of money and investing is infuriating. Economists assume
we’re rational beings, that we constantly evaluate cost and value to
maximize utility. But too often we realize too late that the sort of
thinking that once helped us survive a prehistoric moment of danger —
when we were prey as much as hunter — doesn’t do much good when the
danger is modern and longer term.
One problem investors face is
the concept of the “anchor” price, first described by Daniel Kahneman
and Amos Tversky. Regardless of the value of a share of stock, we tend
to believe that value must be close to the only bit of information many
of us have — the current price. This anchoring effect makes it easier to
justify paying a wildly inflated price for a company that is operating
at a loss or for a market that is hugely overvalued by any objective
measure.
Another common fallacy investors face is herding, or
the tendency to use the actions of others as a measure of sensible
behavior. Fads, fashion, and stock-market bubbles are three examples of
this mindset. When investors lose the sort of hard-nosed skepticism and
difference of opinion that marks a healthy market, it becomes
fashionable, and nearly unavoidable, for too many investors to buy too
many stocks that have too little going for them.
If it were just
psychological quirks that lead to runaway stock market rallies, the
bubble might deflate itself slowly as the anchor price is gradually
lowered and as financial fads and fashions change.
But the stock
market isn’t a purely psychology exercise; too often the real world
intrudes. Each modern stock-market crash has been precipitated by a
catalyst that has little to do with finance and that catches us off
guard. These catalysts push a system barely able to maintain equilibrium
into chaos.
Many of us remember the stock market crash of Oct.
19, 1987 — and little else from that month. But on Oct. 16, the Iranian
military attacked a U.S.-flagged oil tanker in the Persian Gulf, and two
days later the U.S. Navy responded by bombarding Iranian oil platforms.
Anyone listening to the news on the morning of Monday, Oct. 19, would
have thought we were finally at war with Iran. A market that was barely
able to maintain equilibrium — the Dow Jones Industrial Average had
suffered its largest-ever one-day drop up to that point the previous
Friday — was tipped into a crash because of something no investor could
foresee. Other crashes have similar catalysts.
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Where are the regulators while investors are herding
and bankers are devising the latest in a string of unfortunate financial
“innovations”? Like the rest of us, they fail to recognize the danger.
Each
crash is abetted by a novel financial contraption that many ordinary
investors have never heard of or don’t fully understand, making it
impossible to account for the leverage these gadgets inject into the
system when it is at an inflection point.
The benign-sounding
investment trusts of the 1920s were a wonderful way for ordinary
Americans to invest modest amounts in diversified funds — until the
metastatic introduction of leverage by fund sponsors. Soon it wasn’t
unusual for an investment trust to be levered 8 to 1, something that
only makes sense in the context of herding.
In the 1980s,
portfolio insurance, a blindingly complex offshoot of the new math of
valuing derivatives, promised to eliminate risk for some shareholders
while actually increasing risk for everyone when the utopian assumptions
inherent in the math failed to hold.
A few decades later, the
universe of mortgage-backed securities, which had solved several
problems for institutional investors and homeowners, fostered many new
and more insidious problems once bankers learned they could reassemble
mortgages in novel ways — not because the new way was better but rather
because it could be sold.
Where are the regulators while
investors are herding and bankers are devising the latest in a string of
unfortunate financial “innovations”? Like the rest of us, they fail to
recognize the danger, and too often they add to it by pursuing their own
agendas.
Alan Greenspan resolutely refused to regulate
mortgages and mortgage bankers in the last decade despite laws that
required the Federal Reserve to do so and warnings that they should.
Benjamin
Strong was president of the New York Federal Reserve in the 1920s. His
ill-conceived attempt to help his friends in England return to the gold
standard led him to push interest rates in the United States so low that
speculators gobbled up the cheap money and fueled a stock-market boom
that ended with the crash of 1929.
William Morrow
It is easy to believe the
differences between our current financial world and that of just a few
years ago — some call them advances — render another crash impossible.
But financial minds are actively searching for the next contraption.
Risk-parity investing, which uses leverage, might be the next vehicle to
push a market on edge into chaos. Similarly, if a geopolitical problem
is the catalyst for the next crash, it’s difficult to know where to look
first. And the raw material for a crash is a buoyant stock market. The
S&P 500
SPX, +0.03%
Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA, +0.11%
and Nasdaq Composite
COMP, -0.22%
have all recently traded around all-time highs.
The
world of finance is full of charlatans constantly warning of an
impending crash in an effort to sell you gold or get you to subscribe to
their newsletter. The result is another human quirk: We tune out the
drumbeat of warnings and fail to recognize when we’ve actually joined
the herd. Investing has always required discipline, and in the age of
24-hour financial media and Twitter, recognizing the signal amid the
noise will require more discipline than ever.
The American
investor has done more good in this world than anyone with the exception
of the American soldier. But our stock market will crash again —
because we’re human. Scott Nations is the president of NationsShares, a financial engineering firm, and the author of “A History of the United States in Five Crashes.” Follow him on Twitter @ScottNations
Orion/courtesy Everett Collection
The psychology of money and investing is infuriating. Economists assume we’re rational beings, that we constantly evaluate cost and value to maximize utility. But too often we realize too late that the sort of thinking that once helped us survive a prehistoric moment of danger — when we were prey as much as hunter — doesn’t do much good when the danger is modern and longer term.William Morrow
