Tech stocks rebounded on Wednesday. They fell on Tuesday. Your portfolio did worse than both directions because you panic-sold the bottom and then FOMO'd back in at the top. That's what choppy means in your brokerage statement.
The global AI sell-off battered chip companies. Battered is the word journalists use when they need to describe a 3% pullback like it's the Somme. Nvidia dropped. AMD dropped. Your semiconductor ETF dropped harder because expense ratios compound during losses. That's not how math works but it feels true when you check your phone every eleven minutes.
Wednesday brought a rebound. Mostly. The word mostly doing heavy lifting here like a forklift operator who called in sick. Some stocks went up. Others kept drilling. The ones you owned belonged to the second category because you have a gift for buying the exact shares that institutions are unloading to cover their winning positions.
Technical analysts watched the charts. They drew lines connecting random price points and called it support. Support held until it didn't. Then they drew different lines and called those resistance. The lines mean nothing but they photograph well on Twitter where other people who lost money can quote-tweet them with fire emojis.
Retail traders saw the rebound and felt hope. Hope is the emotion you experience in the thirty-minute window between checking your account and remembering you bought at yesterday's high. The AI sell-off scared them. The rebound excited them. Neither price movement had anything to do with artificial intelligence or chip manufacturing or any fundamental reality whatsoever.
The news called it a global sell-off because Taiwan participated. Two countries trading the same stocks at different times of day is technically global. So is your Robinhood account but that doesn't make your 0.3% portfolio allocation to Chinese EV manufacturers an international diversification strategy.
The chop continues until you're out of money or conviction, whichever comes first.
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