[msejas]

Fully agree market psychology has a big influence in prices, TESLA is a great example of this.

My main point is that most people, including the media, whenever there is a big crash in prices, like silver going down double digits, they act like the money evaporated and everyone that invested lost money.

My point is that it's not the case, it dropped because there was a huge volume of people selling, making it cheaper. The people selling converted it all for liquidity, they just 'got' a lot of money in cash to spend, and they needed it or will use it for one reason to another.

Retail investors don't have the time (unless you work in finance) to read all the news and information to be aware of situations that will trigger liquidity crunches like these past few months, while institutional investors will.

My point here is you could have performed all of the value investing in the world and you are still eating losses, standard diversification theory is to put in gold when the markets are unstable, as it appreciates in time of high volatility, we are in times of extreme volatility and gold crashed, it makes no sense unless you have visibility in the institutional investing trends.

[YZF]

People lost money on paper. The loss turns real when they try to sell their assets.

Prices can drop on very low volumes. All that prices tell us is what someone agreed to buy and sell at a given point in time. Some (most?) sellers are likely selling because they are planning to buy when the price is lower (i.e. they are betting the market will go down) not because they need to use it.

Generally gold is not considered an investment or a hedge against marker instability and most diversified portfolios would not have gold in them.

Yes- if I own the S&P 500 and the S&P 500 goes down then the current value of my investment has gone down.

[msejas]

Disagree on many points, stocks are used as collateral for debt financing, their prices can definitely trigger cascade effects and losses even if not actually sold.

Overreaching arguments that sellers are like selling because they plan to buy when it's lower, no proof and a limited view, in fact in my also overreached argument I would say the opposite, most people just want to put money on an ETF and hold it until retirement, without having to touch it, they sell because something is forcing their hand and they need the liquidity to pay for something else.

Gold is definitely a hedge for inflation and market instability which is why it's had such a big run up these past few months, and they are definitely used in most diversified portfolios, yale fund as an example, (I don't know where you got this notion from)

[MichaelZuo]

You just realized pledging claims on paper with multiple degrees of seperation (stocks) for anything with a trigger mechanism, and then banking on it… is a terrible idea?