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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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%
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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
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 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.
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
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.
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
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.”
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
"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.
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.
Every other year is much less frequent than twice a year?
Multiple times every other year.
'Biannual' finally found it's perfect use case.
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.
The fall of the bank didn't cause Nasdaq to fall. But the opposite direction, or both events having a common cause? Entirely possible.
Paraguayan banks with close ties to a politician with, in turn, ties to the Trump family absolutely hint at money moving around.
I thought the bank collapsed on Monday? And it was only like a 3 billion dollar bank? So note huge.
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.
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.
What about 6% or more?
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.
> 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.
You are not taking into account foreign investors. Plenty of countries have a healthy population pyramid and are quickly industrializing.
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.
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.
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.
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
it's the same pattern too. except for 2000 or 2008 it tends to come back really fast too .
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.
Additionally voters rebuffed data centers in every ballot measure
See https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/04/data-center-ballot-measures-...
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.
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’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?
The American consumer might be the most resilient thing on the planet. Blows my mind but there you have it.
They were basically just a national sales tax.
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.
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
You can say Elon
Who are you talking about?
Elon Musk, on the Dwarkesh podcast
Voldemort, presumably
> 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.
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.
> He who shouldn't be named
You had a good comment until this line.
Too much leverage if I had to guess. Stop losses got triggered at the correction threshold.
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.
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.
4% isn't much in context. It wouldn't make the list of 20 biggest drops over the last 20 years.
Do you have sources to share on this besides Reddit?
it's just panic selling, with Ai as the ad hoc justification.
> 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?
Sorry, I don't read twitter. Do you have another link?
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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 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
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.
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 :/
the market was up a lot yesterday though
Not AI stocks. They went the other way and fell further today.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bags getting heavy?
Are we still in the golden age ?
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.
> 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.
Presumably it's more directly the fear of data center projects being blocked
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
We’re back to the same level as 6 months ago. Super scary stuff
So scared right now.
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?
All of them can be true, while still not providing any predictive utility.
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.”
The trick with news media is the word As.
"Market drops 3% as Foo"
The current stock market is astrology for white dudes who have too much money. Nothing matters, nothing makes sense, just vibes
What about black dudes, asian dudes, or other other colors of rich dudes? What would you say the stock market is for them?
Reddit has entered the chat.
Thanks to whoever added that sub, now we have rubbish like this.
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!
> 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.
+4% YoY and -4% in a day are vastly different in timescale.
And at 4% suddenly not keeping up with inflation or treasuries
Ironic, how some people act like they don't understand gradients when it comes to AI-related share prices.
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.
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.
Agree. it's not that big of a deal. i will be buying dip
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.
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?
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.
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.