Your sentiment is shared by so many people who deem this sort of thing "injustice". I think the problem is thinking that the stocks have an innate value, they d

Your sentiment is shared by so many people who deem this sort of thing "injustice". I think the problem is thinking that the stocks have an innate value, they don't, the value is completely determined by the market. Compare and contrast with the following (too common, alas) scenario: 1) Student tells parents that he'll get a B on a course. 2) Parents just know that s/he can do better, so they expect A. 3) Student actually gets B+. 4) Student gets grounded, etc. This would be different, since the grade that the student can "optimally" get from a course is determined outside of parents (simplistically speaking), so they are unjustified in having inflated estimations. That is, in this case, there's an actual quantity (the grade) that (i) is independent of the estimators and (ii) has a "true" value. Both of these assumptions fail for the stock example. Another fallacy is, when reading news like "Markets slump, billions lost" to think that actually billions of dollars were lost. Money is lost when you drop it out of your pocket or when an asset is destroyed, e.g. by fire. In this case what is lost is the expectation of making money. I'm just an engineer, this is my simplistic understanding of the matters.