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Since becoming a parent, one of the simplest ways to describe the experience is that so many things happen all the time.
Which is kind of what the stock market feels like right now. And is kind of what defines the market all the time.
Late Sunday, the latest round of GameStop (GME) fervor was kicked up again when an account believed to be tied to investor Keith Gill, who ignited the meme stock rally in 2021, revealed it spent nearly $175 million building a position in the video game retailer.
This led to a pop in the stock on Monday, with meme darling AMC (AMC) following suit.
At the same time that meme stocks were once again lighting up subreddits and sending the financial media rushing toward a favorite traffic source, the market was also breaking.
Early Monday, a glitch on the NYSE prevented trading in several stocks and led to bad quotes across dozens of names, most notably Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A), which saw its A-shares quoted down 99.9%. Data later showed that GameStop and AMC were among the impacted names.
And as Yahoo Finance's Ines Ferré noted, this issue came just days after problems prevented live calculations for the S&P 500 index and Dow Jones Industrial Average.
For many investors, the novelty of the meme trade's Groundhog Day feel has long since run its course.
With a market cap of $11 billion and annual sales of $5.3 billion in 2023 — down 11% from the prior year — the actual fate of GameStop's business is far from a macro concern. It's not even clear how many traders playing the stock right now even care about the business!
But the frenzied feel of the market right now also doesn't exist in a vacuum. In fact, the opposite is true. Investors are staring down a crucial Fed meeting next week, an uncertain summer for the US economy, and a market that has seen its leadership narrow during its latest run to record highs.
In recent years, the stock market has seemed to pick up speed. In less than four years, investors have seen stocks crash almost 30% from record highs, make new record highs, crash another 25% from those record highs, then make new highs again.
And with investors now able to trade many US stocks 24 hours a day, five days a week, time actually has accelerated in the investing world.
To some investors, the seemingly kinetic energy of the stock market in June 2024 is but an echo of prior periods, and some from not so long ago — October 2022, July 2021, January 2021, April 2020, February 2018, and November 2016, just to name a few.
And as in all parts of life, there's a comfort in acknowledging that we've been here before. Every day the stock market opens, something weird happens. It's why following the stock market never gets old.
So, sure, the meme trade might feel a little tired. Another cryptic social media post, another stock post, and, really, what did we learn? That things keep happening. All the time. And that's the point.
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