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Mel Brooks has already made one parody movie entitled Robin Hood: Men in Tights. The year was 1993, and you had Westley from The Princess Bride, Dave Chappelle, and Patrick Stewart all on screen at the same time. Brilliant.
And now, nearly thirty years later, we have a real-life Mel Brooks-ian parody playing out in the stock market. May I present - Robinhood: Men in Tights (the reprise).
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Well. We knew we didn't have any kind of monopoly on rogue waves, but this one...wow. Iceberg ahead, captain.
In early March, when stocks were down 15%, we wrote that if you were asking yourself "should I be selling stocks", our answer was "yes". Apparently, nobody listened. Shelter-in-place orders turned people to day trading in a big way. E*Trade, TD Ameritrade, and Charles Schwab all saw record new accounts in the first quarter of the year, with Schwab alone reporting 300,000 just in March. All 22 trading days in March were among Schwab's 30 most active days ever. For the new hundreds of thousands of you that will soon be asking "should I sell my stocks", we will reiterate: yes. As I’m writing this (first week in March), the market is in the middle of some obscene volatility thanks to the coronavirus that has started taking over the world like the second coming of Genghis Khan. The crystal ball is decidedly murky on this one, so no telling what things will be like when you’re reading this in April, but here’s hoping the zombie apocalypse chapter story you’ve read in these very pages hasn’t been a massive case of cosmic foreshadowing!
Something I’ve heard a lot in the last week from clients is: “should we be selling stocks?” Perhaps you’ve had the same thought yourself. Fortunately, there’s a straightforward answer to that question: yes, you should sell. But, but....what about long-term investing and buying the dip and “the market will recover” and everything else people say? Irrelevant! Let me explain: What makes markets go up and down? Nobody really knows. It’s largely a psychological phenomenon that just happens, but that doesn’t sound particularly convincing if you’re on TV, so they come up with things like “it’s the robo algorithms” or “investors are worried about the increasing costs of doing business” - both of which are literal quotes I heard last month after the market’s worst-ever (at the time of writing) one-day point loss. Both explanations sound decently plausible, except that they’re not.
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About the Blog:Here lives our collection of newsletters, articles, and some occasional guest posts by outside authors (where indicated) who have quoted us. If you're interested, feel free to browse through the archives here. Categories
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