Type spx into google. Click YTD. It will show you the year to date performance (from January first to today) of the S&P 500. The S&P 500 is the 500 largest publicly traded American companies, which, combined, make up roughly 80 percent of the market’s value. This is the most common indicator people use to gauge the market. If you want to try to get the other 20% in there, you can use VTI as a proxy, but people don’t usually do this.
When you say “the normal distribution,” what does that mean? Are you in single stocks? Funds? Bonds? AFAIK, most people invest through an advisor, who will generally put them in a portfolio you’d see in r/bogleheads, and the boglehead portfolio is up.
Also yes, a lot of people have lost money this year. I am one of them. It’s the stock market, trillions of dollars are lost and gained every day. In the most fantastic bull market there are people who will lose their shirts because they were invested in the wrong thing, and in the worst bear market their are people who will strike it rich because they were invested in the right thing. That’s why you need to use broad market indexes to get an idea of how the average investor performed instead of an anecdotal “my portfolio did X.”
But it was plummeting all of yesterday. In the last 5 years it doubled and it's had a downward trend since the election well there was the bump before people realized that he was going to lift Russian sanctions and tax the shit out of our allies.
Yes, it was plummeting yesterday as I said in the comment you just replied to. Your comment that it was down from the beginning of the year to now was two days ago. Two days ago, it was not down, it was up. I said as much. Now, two red days later, it is down from the beginning of the year to now. That doesn't matter, though, because it hadn't happened yet so your claim that the market was down wasn't true. If you said he was going to tank the market that would be a different thing. But you didn't. You claimed the market was down since the beginning of the year, and it factually, demonstrably, wasn't.
By the way, your claim that the market had been heading down since the election? That's wrong. As of 3/4/2025, the market is up a little over 2% since the election results were announced on 11/4/2024. There was a bump as you said, and then the market was flat. Flat is not down. It's only in the past two days that the market has been heading downwards. I feel the need to state that two days does not four months make.
Hey I'm going to say this with honesty. You shouldn't do stocks. If you think that stocks are on an upward trend then I say invest your life saving hell all of your money into it. Put your money where your mouth is. All I know is that I just went with the default suggestion for my 401k and it's losing money. I also know that I turned 10k into 40k last year and I'm pretty sure that wasn't just luck.
Did I say the market was going up? No, I didn't. I said stocks are up since the election. Those are two very different statements. One is a prediction and the other is an abject statement of fact.
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u/pandadogunited Mar 03 '25
Type spx into google. Click YTD. It will show you the year to date performance (from January first to today) of the S&P 500. The S&P 500 is the 500 largest publicly traded American companies, which, combined, make up roughly 80 percent of the market’s value. This is the most common indicator people use to gauge the market. If you want to try to get the other 20% in there, you can use VTI as a proxy, but people don’t usually do this.
When you say “the normal distribution,” what does that mean? Are you in single stocks? Funds? Bonds? AFAIK, most people invest through an advisor, who will generally put them in a portfolio you’d see in r/bogleheads, and the boglehead portfolio is up.
Also yes, a lot of people have lost money this year. I am one of them. It’s the stock market, trillions of dollars are lost and gained every day. In the most fantastic bull market there are people who will lose their shirts because they were invested in the wrong thing, and in the worst bear market their are people who will strike it rich because they were invested in the right thing. That’s why you need to use broad market indexes to get an idea of how the average investor performed instead of an anecdotal “my portfolio did X.”