The article was probably written after China closed. Someone simply filled in the numbers at the open.

Futures were off bad before the market opened. People look at futures, think the sky is falling, flood the market with sell orders that cannot be filled until market opens, price temporarily crashes, then quants and smart money bring them back.

Would you consider it less flawed if it hadn't rebounded after the drop? I thought being able to recover quickly from market shocks was considered a good thing.

I don't understand your critique. It's a good thing that the market rebounded but how does that make the article better? It's like writing an article about a guy falling out of a plane and how he's going to go splat when he hits the ground, and by the time you hit "publish" the guy has already opened his parachute and landed safely. It's great that he survived but the article is bad!

I wasn't defending the article. The poster I was replying to referred to the market as "flawed", so I suppose I was defending the market?

Right you are. I think I got mixed up somehow. Just apply my bad parachute analogy to the comment above, then!

Why not?

The point of a market is that the price signal reflects all publicly available information available at an instant in time. If more information becomes available, or if the information is uncertain and can be interpreted many ways, the price should jump around. That's what makes it an effective market.

The average person doesn't have to worry about the market - they can park their money in an index fund, buy when they have spare money, sell when they retire, and forget about the price in the intervening years.

> The average person should not have to worry about the market... ever.

And they don't. The market, the real-time market, is there for those that need it. If you're not one of those, just ignore it.

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.

> I'm not rich enough to be an investor

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.

Why was this down voted?

Because it's ignorant. There are cool down systems in place if the stock market swings too wildly in a short period of time.

And downvoting instead of pointing out that there are cool down systems does nothing to reduce the ignorance.

If you've really got a problem with ignorance, do the grown-up thing and attack the ignorance rather than the person.

> 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.