The Nasdaq fell 10 percent from its peak. Analysts call this a correction. Your brokerage app calls it a personal attack.
CNBC wants you to know what typically happens next. History offers a comforting answer. Corrections end. Markets recover. Eventually.
Eventually is doing a lot of work there.
Here is the full historical record, as I understand it. Nasdaq dropped. Then it did something else. Sometimes up. Sometimes down first, then up. Sometimes down, then down more, then a podcast about resilience.
Technical analysts call this a pattern. Retail traders call it Tuesday.
A correction is just a 10 percent decline. The name implies the market was wrong before and is now fixing itself. The market was not wrong. You were. You bought Nvidia at the top because a man in a hoodie on YouTube said the chart looked bullish. The chart looked like a chart.
Now you want to know what happens next. You want history to hold your hand. History does not hold hands. History is a spreadsheet, and you are a rounding error in it.
Averages are comforting. Averages also include the people who sold at the bottom, which is you, about nine days from now.
The article will tell you recoveries happened before. True. They also happened to people who did not check their portfolio forty times a day. Those people are at the beach. You are refreshing a ticker symbol and bargaining with a line on a screen.
Buy the dip, they say. You bought the last three dips. They were not dips. They were stairs.
The Nasdaq will probably recover. Your confidence will not, and neither will the Nasdaq's opinion of you.
Photo by Oren Elbaz on Unsplash
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