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So honest question: A bunch of people who currently own stock are deciding they'd rather have cash instead -- that much is obvious. But what exactly are they
by csense 2y ago
So honest question: A bunch of people who currently own stock are deciding they'd rather have cash instead -- that much is obvious.
But what exactly are they doing with the cash?
Don't want to hold onto it, everyone says devaluation and inflation is coming.
Bitcoin and gold are kinda flat. I expected them to shoot up as uncertainty hedges. What gives?
- mixmastamyk 2y agoGold is up 14% this year, and up last year as well. A lot for something not inclined to move.
- some_furry 2y agoIf I had $1000 in cash, and inflation hits 10%, the purchasing power is equivalent to (1000 / 1.1 = ~$909) in 2026. If I had the same $1000 in stock, and it lost 11% of its value in 2 days, I might worry about it being worth close to $0 by the end of the month.
- bawolff 2y agoIf stocks hit $0, you probably have more immediate concerns - like where you are going to get your next meal and if someone is going to shoot you for the contents of your fridge. Stocks could still continue to fall, but they aren't going to slide to zero.
- some_furry 2y agoStocks overall? No. The few stocks I might have specifically invested in? Possible.
- mathfailure 2y agoThen it'll be a good lesson for you to diversify investments.
- some_furry 2y agoYou're totally missing the point, but ok.
- mathfailure 2y agoWhat was the point?
- some_furry 2y agoWhen faced with "cash in hand that might lose value through inflation" versus "the stocks you currently own at risk of being worthless", the decision to sell is straightforward even in the absense of a next step.
- bawolff 2y agoThere is always a risk that a specific stock will go to 0. It happens even in good ecconomic times. The decision to sell is not straightforward, even given the current situation. It would probably be the wrong decision for the average person unless you really know what you are doing.
- some_furry 2y agoUnder ordinary circumstances, sure. But right now, sell sell sell is a forgiveable reaction.
- whatever1 2y agoThey can fall 90% slowly. Look at south Europe after 2018
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kragen 2y ago> Brazilian hyperinflation lasted from 1985 (the year when the military dictatorship ended) to 1994, with prices rising by 184,901,570,954.39% (or 1.849×1011 percent; equivalent to a tenfold increase on average a year) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Notable_hyperinflationary_periods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Notable_hyperin...
- kragen 1y agoThis should read "1.849×10¹¹ percent".
- ijustlovemath 2y agoInflation only happens if the US starts paying down the debt -- locking up the tariff money in interest payments. Otherwise, there's fundamentally no increase in the supply of money. I'm guessing there still will be inflation for consumers, especially seeing as most don't have the funds to invest in bonds.
- surfaceofthesun 2y agoI’m pretty sure the conventional wisdom suggests inflation happens when countries don’t pay down their debt. Increased money supply isn’t the only cause of inflation (e.g., stagflation). Uncertainty about how to price goods—especially for goods in the middle of supply chains—could cause supply disruptions. It’s a self-inflicted version of the Covid supply disruptions.
- bawolff 2y agoI don't know, but us stocks aren't the only options, they could just be transferring to european stocks.
- alaxhn 2y agoEuropean stocks where down even more than US stocks today (although not down nearly as much yesterday)
- senorrib 2y agoReal estate, bonds, foreign stocks, oil. There's a billion options out there. Or they can just sit and wait. Losing for a bit of inflation is better than losing 20-30% in a recession.
- tasuki 2y ago> Losing for a bit of inflation is better than losing 20-30% in a recession. Except you can't time it like that. Inflation eats your savings all the time, while recessions are short. I have a friend who's been saying "stocks are too risky" since about 2010. He prefers the predictable ~3% inflation...
- senorrib 1y ago1) We're not talking about retail investors here. 2) Institutional investors don't "time" things, they are the market movers.
- heigh 2y agoGold is going off the charts
- IAmGraydon 2y agoCompletely false. It has fallen nearly 5% since the tariffs were announced.
- kristopolous 2y agoTrump just said "fuck you" to 95% of the planet. These stocks have a long way to fall. It sure would be nice to have a competent, organized opposition that does more than finger wag and tsk tsk in a scornful tone
- lazide 2y agoTrump has consistently avoided consequences from breaking the rules. You can’t fight someone like that within the rules, and right now the left will throw anyone who starts breaking the rules in jail while consistently being unable to hold the opposition accountable. It’s enforced self destruction.
- heigh 2y agoNot sure what your position is here. “The left is trying to hold people to account, but that makes them less popular.”?
- lazide 2y agoClearly that is not what I said. The only people the left are capable of holding accountable appear to be other people on the left, or disposable flunkies on the right, so the only thing the left appears to be accomplishing with this approach is self destruction, or clearing out deadwood on the right. Mostly just self destruction.
- kristopolous 2y agoAnyone who says the left is doing anything which requires power should not be taken seriously at all. The left is people like Richard Wolff, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Nader, Norman Finkelstein, Vandana Shiva, Chris Hedges, Michael Parenti, Cornel West. The left has almost no organized political power in the US. Except for a few city councils and a couple state houses, it's zero. When people use "the left" as a catch-all for "not us", some broad brushed painting of "outsiders" this isn't a serious conversation, they're just waving their arms around and making sounds.
- Spooky23 2y agoThe dollar may devalue, but Apple just did.
- jdlshore 2y agoBonds and stocks tend to have an inverse correlation. And, yep, bonds are up while stocks and real estate are down. That’s why financial advisors tell you to keep a mix of stocks and bonds, trending towards a greater percentage of bonds depending on your risk tolerance and as you get older. (Because bonds have lower returns than stocks, historically, but are also less volatile.)
- LikeBeans 2y agoOften yes but sometimes they both go down. However bonds don't decline as fast. The actual strategy I follow is stock/bond/short-term. The short term is like a buffer currently invested in short term treasury fund. Think of it like a game. If stocks are low then sell bonds and when that is also low then use the short term investment to live on to wait out the market recovery. Also if you are retired like me you would tighten expenses when drawing from the short term during a downturn.
- jjav 2y ago> Bonds and stocks tend to have an inverse correlation. Careful with this, it's not always true and which kind and duration of bonds is important.
- outer_web 2y agoInterest rates are high enough that holding cash isn't terrible, particularly if you expect the administration to reverse course on tariffs yet again. Powell said the Fed isn't changing its plans to keep combating inflation from Trump's first term. TLT is worth considering, though maybe we'll see Elon decide the treasury will default on bond payments.
- breadwinner 2y ago> But what exactly are they doing with the cash? Buy Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) and hold them to maturity. (Don't buy TIPS funds, their value fluctuates based on interest rates. Buy actual TIPS instead, at either Fidelity or Vanguard.)
- rsweeney21 2y agoA lot of money is moving into treasuries, which is causing the 10 yr yield to quickly drop below 4%. https://www.barrons.com/articles/10-year-treasury-yield-junk-municipal-bonds-stocks-bcf7e62e https://www.barrons.com/articles/10-year-treasury-yield-junk...
- IAmGraydon 2y agoDon't worry - it will move back out at breakneck speed when Trump threatens to default on the national debt in the not so distant future.
- rglover 2y agoAFAIK this is one of the first times that a significant downward move in the stock market wasn't also seen in the price of Bitcoin. Usually they're correlated.
- iknowSFR 2y agoWhat’s the sample size of significant downward moves in the market during the existence of BTC?
- rtp4me 2y agoROTH conversions.
- LikeBeans 2y agoLookup VUSXX. It is a vanguard short term treasury fund. That's where I put my cash. It is currently paying 4.24% that is state tax free (I live in Oregon). Unfortunately it is hard to predict if that rate will stay high enough. Previously I had 'cash' in iBonds which for a while paid 8-9% early in the pandemic when inflation was high. If none of the above pays well enough I look into treasuries, or CDs.
- Fade_Dance 2y agoI'll give the consensus answers from the trading arena. Each of your questions has a fairly significant long-term backdrop, a medium-term one, a short term one, and an immediate day-to-day narrative. That's fairly obvious, but there is strong confluence now when it comes to some of the things you are asking. And please ignore the grammar - on a phone and banging it out: International money is now flowing out of US assets. This is a shift from the past few years where the US has seen historic inflows that kicked into overdrive with the AI wave. The pairing of stronger dollar and rising US assets made us equities especially attractive for international investors. This peaked with the US exceptionalism trade during the beginning of the Trump presidency, and now as a response to tariffs you are seeing dollar down stocks down which is making the sell-off especially painful for international participants. Before the recent tariff shock, those previous narratives were already coming to an end. European equities have been ripping. That's one place where money has been flowing from big players like hedge funds. A lot of the money has gone into deleveraging. When you look at prime broker data you can see that hedge fund positioning, large asset manager positioning, vol control, CTA, and most of the big market participants have been heavily lowering exposure for a solid month now. Remember that cash can go to lowering leverage. The bond question is very much in play. You are correct that bonds have not been catching a bid. The consensus outlook was moving to stagflationary, and bonds had other hair like the US still having a lot of debt to term out (and newly issue... deficits are running Huge despite the news of cuts in inconsequential places as far as overall budget), and some more recent theater releases about consumer inflation expectations were frankly shocking, and that feeds into the fed's response function when it comes to cutting rates and helping out a bond rally cycle. This is part of the reason you're seeing money go, well, a lot of other places! Like European banks, gold, etc over the past few months. Now we're in a full on recession trade, and this debate is in overdrive. Fed cuts were increasingly priced in, bonds caught a bid, but Powell spoke very recently and said there was too much uncertainty to even consider cuts which pulled back those rate cut expectations. Opinions that are in conflict are priced into various aspects of the market right now, and this will play out in the coming weeks. On to Gold. I think it's fine to simplify it and say that Gold sniffed the danger out. It's been on a face ripping rally for a while now, and what you see now is a great setup for the trading phenomenon of "sell the news." Once everybody is long there's no one left to buy and only sellers can come in from there. When markets get hot like that, you get fast money coming in that is prone to selling on small down moves (because they're only joining the bandwagon to make "easy" money, and they're not interested in losing even a little bit of money. They are also often tourists in that they do not have deep knowledge of the investment product so when something like gold selling off when it should be going up happens, there is a fear response. That said, the gold selloff today is significant. Have heard two commentaries on this, and both agree it's a sign of margin calls and liquidation/sharp capitulation. In extreme sell-offs you see all correlations go to the one, and there is a "dash for cash" to meet collateral requirements and shore up risk metrics. You can also see signs of this in FX markets. Some other commentary from today confirmed stres in treasury liquidity, which is a "safe haven" but also gets liquidated in dash for cash situations. And this does partially answer "where the money is going". T Bills. That's what everyone wants when battening down the hatches. Gold is indeed best viewed as an uncertainty hedge rather than an inflation hedge. That's a good observation. It's really a hedge against systemic fragility though things like people being unsure of Central Bank policy... Tariffs.... Etc. It's not exactly a day-to-day extreme market volatility hedge. Some of the cash is going literally into hedges! Volatility itself is hugely being bid up right now. That stuff is even better than cash because it has negative correlation to risk assets. Stitch everything together and you get a pretty good backdrop for the current sell-off. It even helps explain things like the 2-day back to back action, where day one was a huge selloff but it was somewhat orderly because everyone was coming in with fairly low exposure, so panic didn't really set in until day two (and he's selling feedback loops often continue until liquidation is forced, which marks a bottom for buyers to take a stab at. Nobody wants to step in during a steep grind down of price). Relevant charts. Not all of them have the labels in-chart, but it's all significant data. Ex: here's a real data point that isn't in the charts below, but is a typical example of this sort of data. "High volatility is expected to generate 80 billion USD in equity supply from macro strategy funds over the next week if conditions continue": https://ibb.co/album/KNBSw2 https://ibb.co/album/KNBSw2
- tossandthrow 2y agoSo, the value disappears when the stock market tanks. It is not a zero sum game where the 6 trillion is suddenly cash instead.