One of the factors that caused the 1175 point drop today (the biggest point drop ever in Stock market history so far) was caused by what is called "Automatic Sell orders" which basically means someone has decided arbitrarily to sell at a certain drop in the market a certain stock or group of stocks if such a level is reached "for any reason whatsover".
So, it is likely you could NEVER have had this point drop so deep without automatic Sell orders being triggered all over the place.
Why do Stock owners do this?
Because this way they can maintain their principle at a certain level. For example, when you buy a stock at a certain price you might have a sell order if the market ever reached that price again (going down) so you wouldn't lose any money at all no matter what (except for the price of the transaction itself).
However, if you are a long term investor you think differently than this.
A long term investor is in for the long haul of 1, 5 , 10 or 20 or even 50 years or more.
For example, I had a relative that invested $50,000 into General Electric in the 1950s and by the year 2000 or so it was worth $3,000,000 in value. And likely on top of this since General Electric is Dividend bearing stock there would have been interest every year that there were dividends promised there would have been those earnings too on top of the initial value per year. Since you only pay taxes on the Dividends this would have been quite a thing (if you were willing to wait 50 years watching 50,000 turn into 3,000,000 dollars on top of any dividends it earned.
That's not to say that all stocks are going to do this unless you invested in Apple Computers, Amazon, or Microsoft in the very beginning too, or something like that.
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