According to the Googles, there have been approximately 14,000 trading days since the Nasdaq Composite was founded, and it has fallen four-percent or more 147 days, meaning that we get a decline like this roughly every 100 trading days, which means about twice a calendar year, very roughly.
That's newsworthy, but also not extremely unusual.
The more interesting detail than nasdaq overall is just what sectors are having bad days and how concentrated that is. Seems to be predominantly AI companies, which is very relevant to the HN crowd.
> meaning that we get a decline like this roughly every 100 trading days, which means about twice a calendar year, very roughly.
Stock volatility is typically clustered. So, we can't make this type of claim. Just like this statement is flawed: Chicago experiences below freezing weather 10% of the time, so every 10 days you see below freezing weather.
It does change the point! If it happened roughly twice a year, it's not as noteworthy when it happens than if tends to happen every other year, but four times.
It's more noteworthy when it happens the more clustered it tends to be. If it were typical that we'd go ~7 years with none then have ~16 in a single year, it would be huge news when it happens.
Corrections (down 10% or more): about one per year on average. The Nasdaq is more volatile than the S&P 500, which has a correction closer to every 1.5 to 2 years.
Just to come back and clarify: it bounced this morning. Yesterday wasn't the crash. It's not a cluster. Grandparent point was fundamentally correct. "Nothing to see here", as it were.
It's funny: for all the "pattern recognition" people try to apply to markets, they often miss the very basic ones. "Record highs" are incredibly common, and "corrections" also happen regularly.
June had two similar NASDAQ corrections, July had one as well. Sept was flat, but October was a straight downward trend. On the flip side, April to June was a constantly increasing.
The last time the NASDAQ was this low was all the way back in April 2026...
I get what you're saying, however, a correction is technically a 10% drawdown from a recent high: https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/market-correction-what-do... so you can be neither in a correction nor at an all-time high. You can be down 0.01% to 9.99%
It seems what happens, because of regime change, is investors will take profit moving to cash, and in the coming weeks reposition. For example, Elon is going to have to pay for Doge so he is a political loser. Moving out of SpaceX is pragmatic and expect those who do drive up demand for something else in the coming weeks.
At the end of the day, everyone's retirement is tied to the SP500 and it will always go up.
That’s literally impossible. The market requires a buyer and a seller. If the retired boomers pull their money out, it’ll move the markets to a place that is attractive and affordable for the Gen Alpha.
That isn't where the money propping up the SP500 is coming from. It is a ponzi scheme, yes. It is held up by $40,000,000,000,000 in national debt. That can is getting kicked down the line to one or two generations that haven't been born yet.
You and I don't need to worry about it because we will be long gone by then.
All we know is that Elon isn't getting any more freshly minted currency.
Indexes are essentially 'the rich getting richer'. Great news for wealth disparity if true. But I suspect boomer inheritances will become intergenerational wealth given average number of children and rising age people inherit at.
To be fair, there is no theoretical model for estimating natural CAPE. I’d argue the world of the post 1990s deserves a higher CAPE than the one which preceded it, though we’re trying hard in American to undo that stability.
If the bank collapse in Paraguay hadn’t happened today, and stocks hadn’t initially risen yesterday, I’d tend to agree with you. This is odd enough to potentially have a better explanation than everyone got happy and then sad all of a sudden.
Read enough of these “explanations” of what the market did and a portrait emerges of extreme emotional volatility combined with a fantastic imagination. The market is insanely happy because x went up, which means the Fed will do y, and so pork belly futures will do z. Oh no! Now it is sad! But for the same reason?
It's just diversity at work. Money is diversifying out of US corporations and flooding into other assets and markets. Expectations of the American economy's near-term future have outrun the realities on the ground, so you could say it is a diversification of expectations, too.
As others have said, averages aren't useful unless the behavior matches the average.
If those 147 4% drops actually happened every 100 days or so then it's not newsworthy or interesting, just an occasional correction.
If those 147 days happened all in a row that would mean the nasdaq dropped to 0.25% of its original value in about 4 months, which would be catastrophic.
The real answer is presumably somewhere in the middle, but the specifics are what determines if it's worth noting or not.
Alot going on today. a 4% drop in a day is pretty darn big.
3 different pods are being liquidated that i've heard of. And the data center trade has been unwound in just 2 days is a pretty violent shock.
Lots of rumors about situational awareness also in alot of trouble. I feel for this guy a bit. He did really well to get a good slug of Anthropic shares that made his investors alot of money.
But since about July when it was clear that Anthropic was done going up like a rocket ship his investors have probably been hounding him about how he's going to make money outside of Anthropic.
his first foray into the public markets was a disaster and might set a record for fastest wipe out from start to finish that forced him to have to sell his public book escape a wind up.
But due to Anthropic taking a possible IPO valuation cut he's had to go back to the public markets at the worst time and if rumours going around today are correct, he's looking at how to liquidate his public portfolio for the second time in the quarter.
> And the data center trade has been unwound in just 2 days is a pretty violent shock
Is this true? Coreweave is down ~66% over the last 6 months, with that decline occurring somewhat linearly over that period (i.e. not last 2 days). Very similar chart for Applied Digital.
I mean if you have 1000+ firms, statistically , some will fail no matter what? Like, selling to many calls in a rally, or too many puts in a correction etc.
I agree with the first part of your sentence but to be fair you said to wake you up when a big firm failed and i was only pointing out that, several big firms have failed as I pointed out:)
I fully understand that very few people on hackernews actually are in the capital markets and i happen to be one so I'll always have a far better understanding than outsiders like your self.
I'm just trying to provide some colour to people regarding what's happening today and why fund closures are magnifying this.
I work in quant trading - I can guarantee you at least 4/7 of the firms on that list are well-known, well-respected, and would count as "big funds". Can't comment on the actual pods that apparently went bust though, but generally you should expect the average pod at these places to be at least reasonably good considering the sink-or-swim environment they are perpetually in.
The Nasdaq rebounds so fast though. it's not that big of a deal. bought the dip. I think it's just noise. markets sometimes look for any reason to sell
Thinking a 5% drop in one day is a big deal is recency bias. Other people have pointed out that statistically it is not that rare. We just have been living through an amazing run for equities.
I am not saying I know it will be fine or I know it will be terrible. I am saying I have lived through many 5%+ drops and they happen on the way up and down.
I think the argument is that we have been in a massive everything bubble since summer of 2020, so you have to look back farther to truly understand the rarity of a 4% drop.
Lots of rumors about situational awareness also in alot of trouble. I feel for this guy a bit. He did really well to get a good slug of Anthropic shares that made his investors alot of money.
What is there to feel for him? he took huge bets and lost , although he will still be wealthy no matter how much $ his clients lose. How he got so much attention and money is a mystery; just another example of mediocrity being rewarded. No wonder so many people think society is rigged or screwed. We see in Washington or on Wall Street . The same reckless people keep failing forward, keep being immune to the consequences of their actions and incompetence.
It’s giving me Cathie Wood vibes during Covid years. Bet everything on the bubble and look like a genius while the bubble inflates. Afterwards not so much
The writing is on the wall. They lost. No amount of whining from SV people who don't go outside, who do not live in the real world, and who are high on their own supply of agents and harnesses who vibe-code all day in their small EA/rationalist bubbles and produce very little of actual economic value for normal people and who are so arrogant they are attempting to impose their dystopian will upon people will change this.
Investors are not rationalists or effective altruists. They chase the money. If the fundamentals and DD does not math to allow data centers to be profitable, and governments honor the people's will, they will jump ship and quicker than you think. And if governments do not honor the people's will (which is firmly in opposition to the odious people behind this push) then we have far bigger problems to worry about.
> And if governments do not honor the people's will... then we have far bigger problems to worry about.
Oh, yeah, sure. They'll get right on that. Patriot act is going away any day now. Climate change and healthcare and judicial / law enforcement reform going to be addressed any second.
The grind-down has barely started. We were waiting for a catalyst and it was unexpected. The narrative has shifted to a widespread negative ai-vibe and is hard to counter with any amount of propaganda by the pro ai-crowd. Datacenter debt will be repriced and along with that capex-cuts. These take time and have barely started. The markets have smelt that these are around the corner.
He's an overconfident dipshit who made a few large, successful bets that made heaps of money; but he didn't practice any sort of risk management with his portfolio, and kind of did the opposite.
And despite that failure, he made immense personal wealth and will definitely have the opportunity to run more money in the future.
A few days at > 10% and that's perfectly doable in a week. Unlikely I'll grant you but this is a large move at the top of a bull market amid huge concentration and weakening fundamentals. There are reasons to pay attention to it.
Where are the situational awareness rumors? I enjoy some good schadenfreude, but he pinky swore he was done with leverage, so how can he blow up again? Unless he's getting a flood of redemptions.
Happens every time Democrats win office, then it slowly trickles back up. The anti-datacenter vote screws up a lot of plans but the lack of power generation had already screwed up much of them anyway. He who shouldn't be named said that all these software people are in for a rude awakening when they try to scale real world infrastructure at the rate they're use to scaling virtual software infrastructure.
There's always market volatility in the time surrounding elections, no matter which party dominates. Once the uncertainty settles down, the markets usually do as well.
Trump is/was the very agent of uncertainty himself. Destroyed years of corporate plans and preparations every waking hour with random tariff announcements. Literally a one-man recession.
He’s great if you are in his circle due to the prolific insider trading opportunities. Might be the most lucrative presidency ever for some people in this country.
Nope, because it was also a tax on inputs. Worse, supply chains that crossed the border multiple times would be taxed multiple times. The chaos also made it impossible to plan.
Trump was certainly an outlier, but the observation holds.
Trump (come January anyway) is a lame duck now, especially with a blue Congress. He won't get anything substantial through Congress and everyone's attention will will rapidly shift to who is running in 2028. Nobody on the R side will be seeking or hoping for his endorsement; his leverage over them has been neutralized; they will be working on new messaging to get their traditional voters back. That campaign started on Wednesday.
Sure, he's also a self-centred fool who hates being ignored and thinks he can run again in 2028. I expect him to bomb Iran in the next few days, and congress/senate to be too slow/weak to stop him.
I don't think so. I would not be a bit surprised if impeachment proceedings were started on January 3 (though I think it not to be the best use of their time, they certainly aren't going to listen to me).
He's already been impeached twice, with very little coming out of it. Many republicans would have to truly abandon him for any drastic consequences to happen.
I'm concerned that this might rest too heavily on the presumption of regularity and legality.
There's a lot of (additional) illegal stuff Trump could do if 33 out of ~44 Republican senators are willing to pretend it's not "enough" to remove him from office.
The fate of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act will be highly instructive. It's a bill that's fabulous for renewable energy, good for affordability, good for fossil fuel interests, and could likely pass with a filibuster-proof and veto-proof majority if the Dems don't sabotage it.
Almost all of the interconnect backlog is renewables, so this helps renewables far more than it helps fossil interests, but some progressives want to sabotage the bill because it could theoretically help fossil fuel interests. Yet, there's no way a "better" bill would get past filibuster or Trump's veto.
We'll find out if Democrats let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. Whether they're willing to compromise to get things done.
This is a myth. You can see in both 2018 and 2020, both of which saw Democrat victories, that NASDAQ composite actually went up within 24 hours. Same with the dow. You also see the nasdaq still up a week later in 2018. It was like 2% down in 2020 a week later, which is not meaningful for this argument especially given Covid is a confounding factor. I stopped doing research after this point for specific examples.
There is no meaningful trend or change that happens after elections. Some sector see some weird shifts that correct generally within days
If I had said Elon Musk then there would just be a sea of replies about how evil he is and then more about how amazing he is. It’s best to not even mention his name on HN if you want to stay on topic.
With all respect, that's ridiculous analysis. Even if that were true, the election was the day BEFORE yesterday! You're telling me that the entire world of trading and investment was unable to see the obvious news on their televisions and needed to wait an entire trading day before issuing the sell orders? No one was able to front run this?
This election was different in that the polling leading up to the election was more incorrect than usual, but in the opposite way as previous recent elections. People made financial decisions based on those bad polls. This wasn't the usual midterm backlash.
Given the election result the AI bailout ain’t coming, combined with growing concern AI spending has gotten too forward on its skis. That’s freaking out the markets.
that is right. Trump did this with intel, metals, and other sectors and companies in 2025-2026 . what happens is $ for something else is appropriated for direct investment
For any normal use of the term congress very much is required. They literally control federal spending. If you had some less common idea in mind you should explain it rather than dropping a one line comment that seemingly makes no sense.
It's not ridiculous. Wall Street does this all of the time. It's managing risk and that involves forecasting what will happen in the future.
Maybe you don't like the possibility of Wall Street planning on a bailout, but they are constantly doing that and they also plant stories / narratives in the media encouraging it and they likely whisper in the ears of their politicians that it will "help save the economy" or whatever the FUD of the day is.
I'm not going to comment on the AI bubble, nor if this bill would actually have an effect, but I think this certainly will have an effect on Wall Street's behavior.
I understand the reason for trying to regulate data centers, but given the incredibly rapid pace of AI development and the resulting speed of social change, a temporary regulation could cause us to lose our initiative and miss the trend.
China fosters it intensively at the national level through totalitarianism.
In this rapid social change, democratic procedures may now lose their competitiveness.
I wonder if Anthropic would pull its IPO plan. Considering the past few weeks, this seems like the worst period they could go public in. Not that it may get any better, but perhaps OpenAI deciding to wait next year was more reasonable.
Do you think next year is going to be more favorable? I think investors are wondering where their money is and how anthropic plans to be sustainable long term.
But that's the same for every AI company
Or it could be a "catch a falling knife" opportunity. Too early to tell yet.
But if you look at where the money leaving tech stocks is going, it seems to be rotating into defensive stocks. If that momentum continues, we may have hit a local maxima for a while.
AI isn't, but companies might. The share of tasks you need frontier AI is ever-shrinking and ones where open weight ones are enough is ever-growing.
It won't drop off by a cliff, migrating from existing tooling/vendor that works might just not be worth it, but it seems that there will be less and less money in the frontier
Dotcom was a good buying opportunity? First you had to wait 3 years for it to bottom. Obviously after three years of pain, the dip buyers are all 6 feet under. Even then there was no v shape recovery. Only 2008 and COVID had the quick recovery and long subsequent bull run for tech. But neither one of those was a one day drop. So yeah. Your comment is just cope.
Everyday “Our newspaper makes
money by editorializing every tick change in the [$index] market by attributing unverifiable context and not referencing the previous tick we editorialized.”
No new frontier (Astra / Fable) releases in a while. Actually none since the “pacing the frontier” post. Safety maxxers might cause an AI winter if this is what’s holding them back.
Leaks, for what they're worth, indicate that the next GPT model is soon (tomorrow rumored), and that Fable 5.5 is already ready-to-go. That said Fable is likely being held to drown out said GPT release, since Anthropic is already ahead w/ Opus 5.5.
even if frontier AI development stops where it is today, i would have a hard time calling this an AI winter. I cant imagine AI wont be a major part of my dayjob for the forseeable future
> investors accelerated their move away from technology stocks on fears of a data-center buildout slowdown.
So, approximately how many of those investors are going to lose their jobs and their money for betting on data center buildout while also going about the data center buildout in the most obnoxious, exploitative, electorate-alienating way possible?
Reporting on the stock market generally is overwrought (stocks always "soar!", "plummet!", "rocket!") because the kind of typical events are inherently repetitive. Sports reporting is the same.
That said, the Nasdaq hasn't seen a lot of -4.8% days recently. This particular article isn't egregious.
Intel lost 50% of its value in a week. But it's up 50% from last year.
Anyone paying attention knows the market is in a weird place, and large swings today are the small swings of the past. It's hardly a "plummet" when the amortized line for the past month, including today, is mostly a linear decline.
We've had a couple of single-day 4% drops over the past few months too. Oh no, the market is the lowest it's been in... 3 months!? This is the largest decline we've seen in... 4 months!?
Could it be a market correction? Could it be a full-on collapse? Sure.
But is a single 4% drop worth a headline "plummeting into correction territory"? Not really.
Great! The false belief that stocks must endlessly increase in value is a cancer on society. More wealth for the billionaire class does not mean more wealth for you.
If the market cap is based on future earnings growth (forward thinking) and those earnings are now couched by a lose of ability to build data centers then these tech companies could have issued shared or offered bonds to build out the interconnections they require. So, yes.
I doubt it would have stopped politicians from exploiting the issue, but the answer to your question is yes. Companies could have spent more money on energy infrastructure, which would have increased their cost and - all other things being equal - lowered their share price.
That said, a lower share price is not a cost to the company, except perhaps in terms of stock based compensation.
Stocks are priced on the margin, which means the last sale sets the price, and so the market cap for the whole float. The $440B never really existed. But it could have been used as collateral for loans which would turn it into 'real' money. However when the price falls, those loans may be called in, and so the 'real' money is destroyed. If these loans have to be be paid off by selling the stock, then we enter a deleveraging spiral.
Theoretically the market cap should equal the present value of expected future returns (dividends and buybacks, not speculation), modulo risk, but that assumes a perfect market.
According to the Googles, there have been approximately 14,000 trading days since the Nasdaq Composite was founded, and it has fallen four-percent or more 147 days, meaning that we get a decline like this roughly every 100 trading days, which means about twice a calendar year, very roughly.
That's newsworthy, but also not extremely unusual.
The more interesting detail than nasdaq overall is just what sectors are having bad days and how concentrated that is. Seems to be predominantly AI companies, which is very relevant to the HN crowd.
it's the same pattern too. except for 2000 or 2008 it tends to come back really fast too .
> meaning that we get a decline like this roughly every 100 trading days, which means about twice a calendar year, very roughly.
Stock volatility is typically clustered. So, we can't make this type of claim. Just like this statement is flawed: Chicago experiences below freezing weather 10% of the time, so every 10 days you see below freezing weather.
It happened in 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2025 and 2026, so 6 out of last 11 years. Not sure if I would count it as too rare.
That's every other year, which is quite different from 2+yearly, which is exactly the point the gp was making.
"Four times every two years" isn't exactly the same as "twice every year", but also reflects a similar, "not that unusual" answer.
Although I didn't claim "twice every year like clockwork" in my top-level comment either. It's just a very basic statement of the base rate.
Make it eight-times every four years or sixteen-times every eight years. Or maybe "Four-times every other year, in a clustered fashion".
I don't think any of that really changes the point.
It does change the point! If it happened roughly twice a year, it's not as noteworthy when it happens than if tends to happen every other year, but four times.
It's more noteworthy when it happens the more clustered it tends to be. If it were typical that we'd go ~7 years with none then have ~16 in a single year, it would be huge news when it happens.
I think "every other year" is 100% of a piece with grandparent's point, which is that this is "newsworthy but not notable".
Markets move. Sometimes they move more than normal. This is one of those times.
Will it keep moving? Will it crash? Maybe! But what it has done right now is not that.
Every other year is much less frequent than twice a year?
Multiple times every other year.
'Biannual' finally found it's perfect use case.
Corrections (down 10% or more): about one per year on average. The Nasdaq is more volatile than the S&P 500, which has a correction closer to every 1.5 to 2 years.
Just to come back and clarify: it bounced this morning. Yesterday wasn't the crash. It's not a cluster. Grandparent point was fundamentally correct. "Nothing to see here", as it were.
It's funny: for all the "pattern recognition" people try to apply to markets, they often miss the very basic ones. "Record highs" are incredibly common, and "corrections" also happen regularly.
June had two similar NASDAQ corrections, July had one as well. Sept was flat, but October was a straight downward trend. On the flip side, April to June was a constantly increasing.
The last time the NASDAQ was this low was all the way back in April 2026...
By definition it is either at a record high or in a correction, especially with inflation
I get what you're saying, however, a correction is technically a 10% drawdown from a recent high: https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/market-correction-what-do... so you can be neither in a correction nor at an all-time high. You can be down 0.01% to 9.99%
Probably more helpful to see the Z-score.
It seems what happens, because of regime change, is investors will take profit moving to cash, and in the coming weeks reposition. For example, Elon is going to have to pay for Doge so he is a political loser. Moving out of SpaceX is pragmatic and expect those who do drive up demand for something else in the coming weeks.
At the end of the day, everyone's retirement is tied to the SP500 and it will always go up.
> At the end of the day, everyone's retirement is tied to the SP500 and it will always go up.
Not when more retired boomers are pulling more money out than GenZ/Alphas are putting in.
That’s literally impossible. The market requires a buyer and a seller. If the retired boomers pull their money out, it’ll move the markets to a place that is attractive and affordable for the Gen Alpha.
> retired boomers
That isn't where the money propping up the SP500 is coming from. It is a ponzi scheme, yes. It is held up by $40,000,000,000,000 in national debt. That can is getting kicked down the line to one or two generations that haven't been born yet.
You and I don't need to worry about it because we will be long gone by then.
All we know is that Elon isn't getting any more freshly minted currency.
Indexes are essentially 'the rich getting richer'. Great news for wealth disparity if true. But I suspect boomer inheritances will become intergenerational wealth given average number of children and rising age people inherit at.
You are not taking into account foreign investors. Plenty of countries have a healthy population pyramid and are quickly industrializing.
Statistics about up and down days or particular periods of the stock market can say whatever you want, because they're so easy to cherry-pick.
A more interesting stat is the current CAPE.
https://www.thetrading.tools/shiller-cape
It is at levels only seen three times in the last century.
To be fair, there is no theoretical model for estimating natural CAPE. I’d argue the world of the post 1990s deserves a higher CAPE than the one which preceded it, though we’re trying hard in American to undo that stability.
And has been since 2016
If the bank collapse in Paraguay hadn’t happened today, and stocks hadn’t initially risen yesterday, I’d tend to agree with you. This is odd enough to potentially have a better explanation than everyone got happy and then sad all of a sudden.
Paraguayan banks don't mean a whole lot in the global financial markets.
Paraguayan banks with close ties to a politician with, in turn, ties to the Trump family absolutely hint at money moving around.
The fall of the bank didn't cause Nasdaq to fall. But the opposite direction, or both events having a common cause? Entirely possible.
Read enough of these “explanations” of what the market did and a portrait emerges of extreme emotional volatility combined with a fantastic imagination. The market is insanely happy because x went up, which means the Fed will do y, and so pork belly futures will do z. Oh no! Now it is sad! But for the same reason?
For the same reason, spot FX commentary is utter garbage, yet there seems to be unlimited amounts of it.
I thought the bank collapsed on Monday? And it was only like a 3 billion dollar bank? So note huge.
Wall Street banks avoided becoming a political talking point with that action yesterday.
Also, I wonder who defines these "territories"
People seem to call it a "correction" to make themselves feel better but they're all just crashes to me, and crashes are normal
What about 6% or more?
https://finviz.com/index/COMP?p=d I find those square visualisations valuable since they indicate both size and delta.
AI infra stocks are down more than 50% from the peak and hyperscalers stocks have underperformed the market in 1 year.
It's just diversity at work. Money is diversifying out of US corporations and flooding into other assets and markets. Expectations of the American economy's near-term future have outrun the realities on the ground, so you could say it is a diversification of expectations, too.
As others have said, averages aren't useful unless the behavior matches the average.
If those 147 4% drops actually happened every 100 days or so then it's not newsworthy or interesting, just an occasional correction.
If those 147 days happened all in a row that would mean the nasdaq dropped to 0.25% of its original value in about 4 months, which would be catastrophic.
The real answer is presumably somewhere in the middle, but the specifics are what determines if it's worth noting or not.
Alot going on today. a 4% drop in a day is pretty darn big.
3 different pods are being liquidated that i've heard of. And the data center trade has been unwound in just 2 days is a pretty violent shock.
Lots of rumors about situational awareness also in alot of trouble. I feel for this guy a bit. He did really well to get a good slug of Anthropic shares that made his investors alot of money.
But since about July when it was clear that Anthropic was done going up like a rocket ship his investors have probably been hounding him about how he's going to make money outside of Anthropic.
his first foray into the public markets was a disaster and might set a record for fastest wipe out from start to finish that forced him to have to sell his public book escape a wind up.
But due to Anthropic taking a possible IPO valuation cut he's had to go back to the public markets at the worst time and if rumours going around today are correct, he's looking at how to liquidate his public portfolio for the second time in the quarter.
> He did really well to get a good slug of Anthropic shares that made his investors alot of money.
His wife is chief of staff to Dario isn't she? Not saying this guy isn't smart but let's call a spade a spade here.
> And the data center trade has been unwound in just 2 days is a pretty violent shock
Is this true? Coreweave is down ~66% over the last 6 months, with that decline occurring somewhat linearly over that period (i.e. not last 2 days). Very similar chart for Applied Digital.
Last I heard he was buying options... but maybe he ended up buying the dipping dip.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/11/leopold-aschenbrenners-situa...
Do you have sources to share on this besides Reddit?
> Do you have sources to share on this besides Reddit?
Sources for what specifically?
If you meant for pods and funds blowing up:
https://x.com/SpecialSitsNews/status/2118415084280242230
Gives a decent list. Though most of the ones i know of are from contacts on the sell side who are assisting with wind downs.
And I don't think i mentioned reddit, you might be replying to the wrong thread?
there are like a zillion of these pod shops and tiny firms. doesn't mean much. wake me up when a big fund fails
Those are Billion dollar funds, those are large fish:)
Troluce and Axebrook had more than $1.5B pulled from them by Millennium.
Walleye is a $17B AUM fund.
> there are like a zillion of these pod shops and tiny firms. doesn't mean much. wake me up when a big fund fails
I get that not everyone knows the industry but consider this your wakeup call:)
I mean if you have 1000+ firms, statistically , some will fail no matter what? Like, selling to many calls in a rally, or too many puts in a correction etc.
I agree with the first part of your sentence but to be fair you said to wake you up when a big firm failed and i was only pointing out that, several big firms have failed as I pointed out:)
I fully understand that very few people on hackernews actually are in the capital markets and i happen to be one so I'll always have a far better understanding than outsiders like your self.
I'm just trying to provide some colour to people regarding what's happening today and why fund closures are magnifying this.
The names are well known, the most surprising one for me is Axebrook. ITD from 2020 the Credit Alpha fund is like 1.3 Sharpe.
This and Arini in the same year is pretty bad for credit managers.
I work in quant trading - I can guarantee you at least 4/7 of the firms on that list are well-known, well-respected, and would count as "big funds". Can't comment on the actual pods that apparently went bust though, but generally you should expect the average pod at these places to be at least reasonably good considering the sink-or-swim environment they are perpetually in.
Pods can go broke on a 4% _rise_ in the stock market. They make levered bets and it's easy to get way on the wrong side of one.
Sorry, I don't read twitter. Do you have another link?
it's just panic selling, with Ai as the ad hoc justification.
The Nasdaq rebounds so fast though. it's not that big of a deal. bought the dip. I think it's just noise. markets sometimes look for any reason to sell
Thinking a 5% drop in one day is a big deal is recency bias. Other people have pointed out that statistically it is not that rare. We just have been living through an amazing run for equities.
I am not saying I know it will be fine or I know it will be terrible. I am saying I have lived through many 5%+ drops and they happen on the way up and down.
> Thinking a 5% drop in one day is a big deal is recency bias
In the past 5 years the S&P 500 has dropped 5% 1 time. the Nasdaq has done it 3 times.
You are ofcourse welcome to your own definition of a big deal but to me something that happens that rarely is a big deal.
At worst you'd have to agree that hte language is defensible:)
I think the argument is that we have been in a massive everything bubble since summer of 2020, so you have to look back farther to truly understand the rarity of a 4% drop.
The index isn't even the story.
Chips/Memory/data center everything AI has got absolutely destroyed this month.
Look at LITE, FLEX, FIX, TER, WDC, the Kospi.
Lots of rumors about situational awareness also in alot of trouble. I feel for this guy a bit. He did really well to get a good slug of Anthropic shares that made his investors alot of money.
What is there to feel for him? he took huge bets and lost , although he will still be wealthy no matter how much $ his clients lose. How he got so much attention and money is a mystery; just another example of mediocrity being rewarded. No wonder so many people think society is rigged or screwed. We see in Washington or on Wall Street . The same reckless people keep failing forward, keep being immune to the consequences of their actions and incompetence.
It’s giving me Cathie Wood vibes during Covid years. Bet everything on the bubble and look like a genius while the bubble inflates. Afterwards not so much
> And the data center trade has been unwound in just 2 days is a pretty violent shock.
It's very very far from being unwound. If (or when) it does, many companies in the space will be down 90-100%. Definitely not today.
The writing is on the wall. They lost. No amount of whining from SV people who don't go outside, who do not live in the real world, and who are high on their own supply of agents and harnesses who vibe-code all day in their small EA/rationalist bubbles and produce very little of actual economic value for normal people and who are so arrogant they are attempting to impose their dystopian will upon people will change this.
Investors are not rationalists or effective altruists. They chase the money. If the fundamentals and DD does not math to allow data centers to be profitable, and governments honor the people's will, they will jump ship and quicker than you think. And if governments do not honor the people's will (which is firmly in opposition to the odious people behind this push) then we have far bigger problems to worry about.
> And if governments do not honor the people's will... then we have far bigger problems to worry about.
Oh, yeah, sure. They'll get right on that. Patriot act is going away any day now. Climate change and healthcare and judicial / law enforcement reform going to be addressed any second.
> It's very very far from being unwound.
The grind-down has barely started. We were waiting for a catalyst and it was unexpected. The narrative has shifted to a widespread negative ai-vibe and is hard to counter with any amount of propaganda by the pro ai-crowd. Datacenter debt will be repriced and along with that capex-cuts. These take time and have barely started. The markets have smelt that these are around the corner.
4% isn't much in context. It wouldn't make the list of 20 biggest drops over the last 20 years.
The drop was 5.5% and from what I can see, its number 5 on the list of biggest Nasdaq drops in a single day in history.
Semi stocks have fallen more than 50% from the peak or in just the past 30 days.
Why would you feel for him?
He's an overconfident dipshit who made a few large, successful bets that made heaps of money; but he didn't practice any sort of risk management with his portfolio, and kind of did the opposite.
And despite that failure, he made immense personal wealth and will definitely have the opportunity to run more money in the future.
I'd love to fail as badly as he did.
> Alot going on today. a 4% drop in a day is pretty darn big.
Yeah, but it's up 50% in the last 5 years. 4% drop puts us back where it was, oh, in July of this year.
Only has to fall by 33% to go back 5 years then.
A few days at > 10% and that's perfectly doable in a week. Unlikely I'll grant you but this is a large move at the top of a bull market amid huge concentration and weakening fundamentals. There are reasons to pay attention to it.
Where are the situational awareness rumors? I enjoy some good schadenfreude, but he pinky swore he was done with leverage, so how can he blow up again? Unless he's getting a flood of redemptions.
Happens every time Democrats win office, then it slowly trickles back up. The anti-datacenter vote screws up a lot of plans but the lack of power generation had already screwed up much of them anyway. He who shouldn't be named said that all these software people are in for a rude awakening when they try to scale real world infrastructure at the rate they're use to scaling virtual software infrastructure.
There's always market volatility in the time surrounding elections, no matter which party dominates. Once the uncertainty settles down, the markets usually do as well.
Trump is/was the very agent of uncertainty himself. Destroyed years of corporate plans and preparations every waking hour with random tariff announcements. Literally a one-man recession.
He’s great if you are in his circle due to the prolific insider trading opportunities. Might be the most lucrative presidency ever for some people in this country.
I’m surprised his tariffs didn’t have a bigger impact, I fully expected them to crater the US economy.
The economy toppled the regime; At least, what Red leaders are saying. You are missing out.
https://x.com/JeffFlake/status/2118355575356727470
https://x.com/tedcruz/status/2118125881067487633
Always does. They forgot the organizing principle of Bill Clinton's campaign: It's the economy, stupid!
A lot of people liked Trump's brash and swaggering personality but not to the point that they stopped caring about their pocketbook.
is it possible you were mislead?
They were basically just a national sales tax.
Nope, because it was also a tax on inputs. Worse, supply chains that crossed the border multiple times would be taxed multiple times. The chaos also made it impossible to plan.
The American consumer might be the most resilient thing on the planet. Blows my mind but there you have it.
Trump was certainly an outlier, but the observation holds.
Trump (come January anyway) is a lame duck now, especially with a blue Congress. He won't get anything substantial through Congress and everyone's attention will will rapidly shift to who is running in 2028. Nobody on the R side will be seeking or hoping for his endorsement; his leverage over them has been neutralized; they will be working on new messaging to get their traditional voters back. That campaign started on Wednesday.
Sure, he's also a self-centred fool who hates being ignored and thinks he can run again in 2028. I expect him to bomb Iran in the next few days, and congress/senate to be too slow/weak to stop him.
I don't think so. I would not be a bit surprised if impeachment proceedings were started on January 3 (though I think it not to be the best use of their time, they certainly aren't going to listen to me).
I fervently hope you're right.
He's already been impeached twice, with very little coming out of it. Many republicans would have to truly abandon him for any drastic consequences to happen.
> Trump (come January anyway) is a lame duck now
I'm concerned that this might rest too heavily on the presumption of regularity and legality.
There's a lot of (additional) illegal stuff Trump could do if 33 out of ~44 Republican senators are willing to pretend it's not "enough" to remove him from office.
People always forget the Erdoǧan Principle. Democracy is a train. You take it to where you want to go, and then you step off.
This is cope. Trump is still very popular among Republican primary voters. An anti-Trump candidate faces an uphill battle with the base of the party.
He has been pushing a lot of his agenda via executive orders. I doubt Congress is going to stop him since he can veto whatever he wants.
The fate of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act will be highly instructive. It's a bill that's fabulous for renewable energy, good for affordability, good for fossil fuel interests, and could likely pass with a filibuster-proof and veto-proof majority if the Dems don't sabotage it.
Almost all of the interconnect backlog is renewables, so this helps renewables far more than it helps fossil interests, but some progressives want to sabotage the bill because it could theoretically help fossil fuel interests. Yet, there's no way a "better" bill would get past filibuster or Trump's veto.
We'll find out if Democrats let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. Whether they're willing to compromise to get things done.
Too much leverage if I had to guess. Stop losses got triggered at the correction threshold.
Additionally voters rebuffed data centers in every ballot measure
See https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/04/data-center-ballot-measures-...
Who are you talking about?
Elon Musk, on the Dwarkesh podcast
Voldemort, presumably
You can say Elon
This is a myth. You can see in both 2018 and 2020, both of which saw Democrat victories, that NASDAQ composite actually went up within 24 hours. Same with the dow. You also see the nasdaq still up a week later in 2018. It was like 2% down in 2020 a week later, which is not meaningful for this argument especially given Covid is a confounding factor. I stopped doing research after this point for specific examples.
There is no meaningful trend or change that happens after elections. Some sector see some weird shifts that correct generally within days
That’s what I said, the market swings and then eventually comes back to normal.
> He who shouldn't be named
You had a good comment until this line.
If I had said Elon Musk then there would just be a sea of replies about how evil he is and then more about how amazing he is. It’s best to not even mention his name on HN if you want to stay on topic.
> Happens every time Democrats win office
With all respect, that's ridiculous analysis. Even if that were true, the election was the day BEFORE yesterday! You're telling me that the entire world of trading and investment was unable to see the obvious news on their televisions and needed to wait an entire trading day before issuing the sell orders? No one was able to front run this?
That's just silly, sorry.
This election was different in that the polling leading up to the election was more incorrect than usual, but in the opposite way as previous recent elections. People made financial decisions based on those bad polls. This wasn't the usual midterm backlash.
What plan did people make that falls apart when Democrats aren’t in office for a couple months?
"then it slowly trickles back up" as it slowly dawns on people that very littel has changed.
Given the election result the AI bailout ain’t coming, combined with growing concern AI spending has gotten too forward on its skis. That’s freaking out the markets.
the market was up a lot yesterday though
Not AI stocks. They went the other way and fell further today.
exit liquidity
Congressional approval isn't required for an AI bailout.
that is right. Trump did this with intel, metals, and other sectors and companies in 2025-2026 . what happens is $ for something else is appropriated for direct investment
AFAICT there's a lawsuit over the Intel thing in Paisner v. Tan, but I'm not sure what its current outlook is.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/esg/lutnick-defends-trumps-int...
https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/64069897/Paisner_v_...
privatize the gains
socialize the losses
we truly have learned nothing :/
I don't think Trump can provision hundreds of billions for a bailout without Congress. Thank goodness.
For any normal use of the term congress very much is required. They literally control federal spending. If you had some less common idea in mind you should explain it rather than dropping a one line comment that seemingly makes no sense.
> Given the election result the AI bailout ain’t coming
And why should it have? Ridiculous to pre-emptively talk about a bailout before a crash has even materialized. Who exactly was going to be bailed out?
It's not ridiculous. Wall Street does this all of the time. It's managing risk and that involves forecasting what will happen in the future.
Maybe you don't like the possibility of Wall Street planning on a bailout, but they are constantly doing that and they also plant stories / narratives in the media encouraging it and they likely whisper in the ears of their politicians that it will "help save the economy" or whatever the FUD of the day is.
The DNC is thinking about a "No AI Bailouts" bill:
https://democrats-financialservices.house.gov/news/documents...
I'm not going to comment on the AI bubble, nor if this bill would actually have an effect, but I think this certainly will have an effect on Wall Street's behavior.
I understand the reason for trying to regulate data centers, but given the incredibly rapid pace of AI development and the resulting speed of social change, a temporary regulation could cause us to lose our initiative and miss the trend.
China fosters it intensively at the national level through totalitarianism.
In this rapid social change, democratic procedures may now lose their competitiveness.
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.
Wasn't that because of the tariffs?
I wonder if Anthropic would pull its IPO plan. Considering the past few weeks, this seems like the worst period they could go public in. Not that it may get any better, but perhaps OpenAI deciding to wait next year was more reasonable.
I guess it depends on when they need to start paying for all the promises. They have run out of investors willing to take an IOU.
Do you think next year is going to be more favorable? I think investors are wondering where their money is and how anthropic plans to be sustainable long term. But that's the same for every AI company
Depending on how long the bloodbath goes on this could be a massive buy moment similar to: dot bomb, 9/11, 2008, covid panic.
AI is not going anywhere and will only grow more and more.
Bags getting heavy?
agree. good dip buying opportunity
Or it could be a "catch a falling knife" opportunity. Too early to tell yet.
But if you look at where the money leaving tech stocks is going, it seems to be rotating into defensive stocks. If that momentum continues, we may have hit a local maxima for a while.
Rotation seems to be slow: NATO etf is down as much as VOO today
AI isn't, but companies might. The share of tasks you need frontier AI is ever-shrinking and ones where open weight ones are enough is ever-growing.
It won't drop off by a cliff, migrating from existing tooling/vendor that works might just not be worth it, but it seems that there will be less and less money in the frontier
True, but open weights models need data centers too. So it depends on which companies we're talking about.
Dotcom was a good buying opportunity? First you had to wait 3 years for it to bottom. Obviously after three years of pain, the dip buyers are all 6 feet under. Even then there was no v shape recovery. Only 2008 and COVID had the quick recovery and long subsequent bull run for tech. But neither one of those was a one day drop. So yeah. Your comment is just cope.
Are we still in the golden age ?
Tuesday - "Market falls because of election"
Wednesday - "Market soars because of election"
Thursday - "Market plummets because of election"
Can we at least agree that no one has any idea what is going on?
Everyday “Our newspaper makes money by editorializing every tick change in the [$index] market by attributing unverifiable context and not referencing the previous tick we editorialized.”
All of them can be true, while still not providing any predictive utility.
And they can all be false. GP's point is that the reporting always suggests causation when causation is rarely if ever knowable.
OK, they are jumping up and down but they're doing it in the most efficient way possible. It has been proven time and time again!
The trick with news media is the word As.
"Market drops 3% as Foo"
We’re back to the same level as 6 months ago. Super scary stuff
So scared right now.
No new frontier (Astra / Fable) releases in a while. Actually none since the “pacing the frontier” post. Safety maxxers might cause an AI winter if this is what’s holding them back.
Presumably it's more directly the fear of data center projects being blocked
> No new frontier (Astra / Fable) releases in a while.
Am I crazy? Wasn't Astra released just over a month ago? And wasn't Fable 5.1 released around the same time?
How often do we expect frontier models to be released?
GPT-5.6 Sol was July 9 > GPT-6 Sol was September 22 (75 days)
Fable 5 was June 9 > Fable 5.1 was September 1 (85 days)
Opus 5 was July 24 > Opus 5.5 was September 22 (61 days)
Yeah, we're not due for a model refresh until the end of month if current release roadmaps of 2-3 months hold.
Leaks, for what they're worth, indicate that the next GPT model is soon (tomorrow rumored), and that Fable 5.5 is already ready-to-go. That said Fable is likely being held to drown out said GPT release, since Anthropic is already ahead w/ Opus 5.5.
even if frontier AI development stops where it is today, i would have a hard time calling this an AI winter. I cant imagine AI wont be a major part of my dayjob for the forseeable future
> investors accelerated their move away from technology stocks on fears of a data-center buildout slowdown.
So, approximately how many of those investors are going to lose their jobs and their money for betting on data center buildout while also going about the data center buildout in the most obnoxious, exploitative, electorate-alienating way possible?
> Plummets
Still +4% YoY.
24/7 sensationalist news is just exhausting.
Reporting on the stock market generally is overwrought (stocks always "soar!", "plummet!", "rocket!") because the kind of typical events are inherently repetitive. Sports reporting is the same.
That said, the Nasdaq hasn't seen a lot of -4.8% days recently. This particular article isn't egregious.
+4% YoY and -4% in a day are vastly different in timescale.
And at 4% suddenly not keeping up with inflation or treasuries
Intel lost 50% of its value in a week. But it's up 50% from last year.
Anyone paying attention knows the market is in a weird place, and large swings today are the small swings of the past. It's hardly a "plummet" when the amortized line for the past month, including today, is mostly a linear decline.
We've had a couple of single-day 4% drops over the past few months too. Oh no, the market is the lowest it's been in... 3 months!? This is the largest decline we've seen in... 4 months!?
Could it be a market correction? Could it be a full-on collapse? Sure.
But is a single 4% drop worth a headline "plummeting into correction territory"? Not really.
> Could it be a market correction?
That term has a very specific meaning in that context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_correction
[ For the record, the link I originally included: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-5... ]
JSYK, that's a paywalled link.
Ironic, how some people act like they don't understand gradients when it comes to AI-related share prices.
Seriously, according to the headlines I've seen shared here since June you'd think the market got wiped out 5 or 6 times.
This is a bigger jump, but it's also immediately after elections and other activity so I'd expect higher volatility than normal.
Agree. it's not that big of a deal. i will be buying dip
Why were you in cash to begin with?
> Still +4% YoY.
Do you think people who buy QQQ are impressed with this?
VTV is up 21% yoy btw.
Great! The false belief that stocks must endlessly increase in value is a cancer on society. More wealth for the billionaire class does not mean more wealth for you.
By "value," do you mean real or nominal?
Many stocks cost less than $1B. I own a few of them myself.
Would paying for the interconnections and transmission infra have been cheaper than the sum of value lost to the market in one day?
What does "sum of value lost" mean?
Yesterday Nvidia's market cap was 4.89T. Today it is $4.45T. What happened to the $440 billion? Do you think we could have built factories with it?
If the market cap is based on future earnings growth (forward thinking) and those earnings are now couched by a lose of ability to build data centers then these tech companies could have issued shared or offered bonds to build out the interconnections they require. So, yes.
I doubt it would have stopped politicians from exploiting the issue, but the answer to your question is yes. Companies could have spent more money on energy infrastructure, which would have increased their cost and - all other things being equal - lowered their share price.
That said, a lower share price is not a cost to the company, except perhaps in terms of stock based compensation.
Stocks are priced on the margin, which means the last sale sets the price, and so the market cap for the whole float. The $440B never really existed. But it could have been used as collateral for loans which would turn it into 'real' money. However when the price falls, those loans may be called in, and so the 'real' money is destroyed. If these loans have to be be paid off by selling the stock, then we enter a deleveraging spiral.
Theoretically the market cap should equal the present value of expected future returns (dividends and buybacks, not speculation), modulo risk, but that assumes a perfect market.
> Theoretically the market cap should equal the present value of expected future returns
Did you just wake up from a 30 year nap or?