There is a cool down system if things become too volatile. They halt trading for 15 minutes or shut it down for a day. They mentioned that if S&P500 were to drop 7% they would halt trading for 15 minutes today.
It doesn't take much money to invest in the stock market. Do you consider yourself thrifty? That's the major criteria for becoming an investor. Living below your means and saving. I have been in the working world for ~8 weeks now and already have some investments lol.
> And downvoting instead of pointing out that there are cool down systems does nothing to reduce the ignorance.
It reduces the ignorance in those who read the comments and draw conclusions from what is upvoted and what is downvoted (even though most people won't admit that they do it even to themselves).
I am not an expert on the particular use, but I think it probably behooves people to disconnect a downvote of someones comment from an attack on the person.
A wildly ignorant comment (that could be remedied by a simple reading of the comments on this story) probably deserves downvotes as it doesn't add to the discussion at hand at all.
That said, this whole comment section probably deserves a big downvote as it is largely not very good from top to bottom.
It appears a good portion of comments in this thread have been, many of them not obviously bad. HN seems to have developed a contingent of people who downvote anything they disagree with, without explaining why they disagree, and this thread is particularly heavy on them.
Many people down vote every post in a discussion if it seems off topic. Considering single day drops are the kind of thing you see plastered over CNN many people consider it off topic for HN.