[potamic]

All these media people who write about markets need to adjust their perspectives on what a sell-off means. A 2% reduction for a market cap of 80 trillion dollars still leaves about 78 trillion dollars in the market. The way the market behaves when there's 78 trillion dollars would be very different from how it would if there were 20 trillion dollars. With volumes of these kind, the instrument becomes a currency in itself causing a sort of runaway effect that will keep it going. When everyone's money is in the market, would the market ever fall?

[throw0101d]

> When everyone's money is in the market, would the market ever fall?

Price discovery is at the margins: it's determined by (active) buyers and sellers.

If you're a (passive-ish) buy-and-hold kind of person you're generally not involved in the process (except on your (bi-)monthly purchase off your paycheque in for your retirement account).

So the active folks can cause prices to go down.

[vitally3643]

> When everyone's money is in the market, would the market ever fall?

Yes? We had an entire great depression that tanked the global economy for a decade, and smaller dips since.

I regret to inform that the line does not, in fact, always go up. It does go down sometimes regardless of how much money is put into it.

[tonyedgecombe]

The money isn’t in the market, when you buy shares the money goes to the seller.

[potamic]

Money in this context is just proxy for value. You have exchanged cash for an equal value of stock. After this either could go up or down in value as the market determines. Sometimes the market doesn't like one kind of cash even and that value can reduce. On the other hand, if everyone is invested into a certain kind of cash then it's unlikely that cash would ever lose its value. Stocks have to work the same way fundamentally. The difference so far has been the volume at which these transactions happen. But since 2008, the volume of stock transactions has been growing exponentially. Has it crossed a critical mass ensuring its value will be propped up for a really long time?

[khurs]

>All these media people who write about markets need to adjust their perspectives on what a sell-off means...

err... they already know. It's click bait stories to get readership.