Yet another Hacker News

62 points madihaa 1 hour ago 45 comments

bell-cot 1 hour ago | parent

Similar to the old saw about you owning the bank $10 thousand vs. $10 billion, the "value" of stocks does not scale.

novaRom 57 minutes ago | parent

Selling AI stocks before year-end makes sense, right? New Congress, new House take over in January. Cost of living so tax hikes next year. Better to lock in gains now than pay more later? Besides cash is now bringing more than 4% pa

hoppp 51 minutes ago | parent

End year sales are common. Black friday, Christmas whatever. People spend and taking profit feels good.

ThunderSizzle 24 minutes ago | parent

I expect Democrats to be as pro big business as they always have been - as long as they are "regulated" to be in sync with Democrats desires.

They'll be anti data centers until they are no longer the opposition party. Then suddenly both Republicans and Democrats will change while MAGA/America First and woke 2.0/socialists sides won't have changed at all.

Isn't the political party system great!

triceratops 22 minutes ago | parent

> Cost of living so tax hikes next year. Better to lock in gains now than pay more later?

Deliberately pay capital gains tax now on the off-chance taxes go up next year? You do you my friend.

hn_submit 47 minutes ago | parent

People the AIpocalypse is real!! Brace yourselves for a $10 Trillion wipeout.

Anthropic and OpenAI will disintegrate and vanish in the mist.

That's all folks!!!

drivebyhooting 43 minutes ago | parent

I hope not. I need my subsidized subscription and I’m not satisfied with argon

yread 41 minutes ago | parent

I'm already pushing my bathtub out so that I can catch all the GPUs that will soon start raining down from the clouds

throwaway384034 34 minutes ago | parent

Looks like the party is over, now for the hangover.

amelius 34 minutes ago | parent

Can I have my DRAM now?

silverFork 22 minutes ago | parent

LOL

SwellJoe 31 minutes ago | parent

As usual, I was right about the market but way too early. I sold all of my AI-exposed stocks last year, as I knew the investment going into it couldn't be recouped in a reasonable time. If I'd held longer, I'd be up about 2x on those shares even if I'd only sold in a panic yesterday.

But, it also means I can probably reinvest in some of those stocks now that a correction is in progress. There are some excellent tech companies with strong leadership and strong growth (e.g. ARM) that have been too expensive for a long time; still too expensive, but getting closer to reasonable.

cgeier 26 minutes ago | parent

Being early means you were not right, it‘s all about the timing.

curiousllama 20 minutes ago | parent

I know they'd be down 50%! I just didn't know they'd be up 500% before that.

gopher2000 9 minutes ago | parent

"I thought they'd be down 50% and they're up 450% so I was mostly right"

SwellJoe 8 minutes ago | parent

It's about timing and direction. Timing doesn't matter if it's not a well-run business.

Most of my holdings with AI exposure were and are well-run businesses; they were when I bought them, when I sold them, and throughout the AI-inspired rise. The problem was I didn't believe there was sufficient market opportunity to justify the stratospheric rise, and I think the market has now begun to catch up to that thinking. The market has begun to agree with the premise I based my decision to sell on.

I suspect the decline will continue and I will be able to buy back into at least some of the stocks I sold at a price better than what I sold them for.

So, yes, my post was to say I am frequently wrong on timing, even if the premise I based a decision on turns out to be true. I don't understand people, but I understand tech.

hagbard_c 21 minutes ago | parent

Yes, well, remember the dot-com boom/bust cycle? Lots of people lost a lot of money then but not all of those stocks ended up becoming worthless. Some held on to what they had and made a fortune once the internet-hype was over and the internet-era began. The same could happen with some - but certainly not all - of these 'AI-exposed' stocks. Once the 'AI' hype is over the 'AI era' will probably begin, especially if the dearth of RAM and matrix processing capacity is solved somehow.

SwellJoe 5 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

schnuri 29 minutes ago | parent

I always find these market cap numbers misleading. The US stock market isn't "worth" $2.5T less. If you multiply the marginal share price by the total number of shares, you get a number that's $2.5T lower. That is something different. E.g., if you tried to sell all Nvidia shares at once, you'd never get anywhere near ~$4.5T (just as buying them all would cost far more).

curiousllama 19 minutes ago | parent

2.5T sounds impressive, but less impressive next to 82T total market cap

adam_arthur 6 minutes ago | parent

What something's worth is what somebody is willing to pay for it.

curiousllama 22 minutes ago | parent

This is definitely scary, but not the end of the world (yet).

The S&P500 is still up ~7% YTD, and 5y CAGR of 9.4% before dividends, in line with historical norms.

This is primarily a decline in tech: week over week, the S&P is -4.5% (SPX), but the S&P excluding tech is +0.1% (SPXT).

Right now, this looks like speculation that tech will reduce capex after Q4 earnings (Nvidia, Micron, Sandisk, AMD all down >2x vs the S&P). But it'll take time to tell; most just announced Q3 a week ago.

All this to say: expect volatility, but no need to panic.*

*(Unless you're in TQQQ. Then panic.)

staticman2 16 minutes ago | parent

It's not scary at all unless you think stocks are a riskless asset expected to always go up and bonds and bank accounts are for suckers.

deadbabe 22 minutes ago | parent

AI has always been disgusting republican technology, built on stolen works, trashing the environment, eliminating jobs, growing the gap between wealthy and poor, just slimy people all around in the industry. Liberal progressive people should not use AI. The market should give back all tech gains.

foolswisdom 19 minutes ago | parent

For all the federal election related takes, remember that

1. Market price changes are changes from what was expected before compared to what is expected now. And not even only in regards to the asset itself, but with respect to comparative change in other assets as well. 2. conventional wisdom when the branches of government are divided, less change comes from the government, so you can expect that your expectations for the future will remain stable, and that confidence reduces risk aversion, resulting in higher pricing.

Therefore, the market going down cannot be attributed purely to a question of who is in charge, because the democrats can't pass anything unless they get a nice number of Republicans on their (possible I suppose, but I don't think anyone is expecting that right now). But it could be attributed to expectations of what Republicans would do vs now that they can't.

Besides, it's basically impossible (or at least for layman, who knows if you're a market maker?) to accurately attribute a day's market behavior to any event, with a compelling causal explanation (sometimes your attribution could also be explained to have the opposite effect than the one you're trying to explain) and not ignoring alternate possible explanations.

It's kinda annoying when even otherwise serious people invoke the market movement of a day as an meaningful event that can be explained (notwithstanding that by tomorrow the effect might have reversed). But unfortunately business news like CNBC promotes that kind of thinking.

foolswisdom 18 minutes ago | parent

It's still quite possible that all the non federal items on the ballot (lots of anti data center referendums, lots of democrat politicians in state office) matter quite a bit.

shevy-java 14 minutes ago | parent

They are pillaging.

It will be a long time required here, investigating all corruption that has been happening.

Inflation increase should be viewed as a mafia in charge of a country.

vladmk 12 minutes ago | parent

2.5 Trillion unfortunately is nothing compared to the debt we're in smh

dudefeliciano 9 minutes ago | parent

Interesting how the coverage of midterm elections was flagged with many users talking about how politics are not a hacker worthy topic but this somehow seems to be

huqedato 9 minutes ago | parent

Sell the dip! I'm buying cheap.

hacker_9 9 minutes ago | parent

April 2025, nasdaq enters bear territory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43587479

It's interesting reading the panic then in the comments, and yet now the nasdaq is up 65% from those lows, even with today's drop.

jrflo 7 minutes ago | parent

Sounds scary until you realize that this happens about once per year on average. If this happens again tomorrow and a few more times in the few couple weeks that would be bad, but as of now it's notable but not a huge deal.