It never existed.
If you make two beautiful paintings, and sell one for $1000, then decide to sell the other, but nobody wants it for more than $500, you didn’t “lose” the $500 difference.
Maybe you even told people you had another $1000 painting, then only got $500 in cash for it, so your reported net wealth dropped by $500.
At worst, you actually paid $1000, then sold for $500, but even then, the difference didn’t disappear, you just transferred it to the original owner by overpaying, or to the new owner by undercharging if the price goes back up.
Indeed, if they’re talking about market capitalization then “wiped out” doesn’t make sense. It’s just simply a measure of the dollar cost of shares, much more important is liquidity and real volume.
But the stock market sounds like a zero sum game.
Who sold the stock off early? If everyone wanted to devest from a specific company and we all sold our stock at the same time and nobody wanted to buy it… huh
How is it a zero sum game if prices can just go up or down almost arbitrarily?
The value of a stock IS what it was previously sold for. If it sells for $100, and there are 100 shares issued, the company has a total worth of +$10,000 from stocks.
If the stock sells for 90 bucks, then the “wealth from stocks” goes down to +9,000 total since every share is now “worth” 90 dollars.
Thanks. I’m seeing two conflicting stories in my mind.
I’d the company is worth $10,000 and there are 100 shares. And if I sold 10 for $100 each the company is still worth $10,000?
But who gets to calculate when the value goes down? Is it when someone offers me $90 and I accept? Why can’t I just pretend to be two people and sell myself stock at $10 to artificially tank the price so I can buy the dip? Or do the reverse and pump the price up?
Or maybe the first 10% to sell gets the best deal and the price auto-magically goes down because of ‘market trend’ and each next 10% gets increasingly screwed until the company is worthless?
Congratulations, you just figured out market manipulation! Some of that isn’t strictly legal, but since when does that affect people’s actions?
Same place it came from.
Thin air.
It’s not real. It’s just gambling for rich people. Occasionally they use it to steal from our retirement.
Agreed. It wasn’t real when it was there and it isn’t real now that it isn’t.
You buy 10 copies of a specific collectible card for $5 each. Everybody is willing to pay $5 for each card you own, so you theoretically have $50 in the form of trading cards.
But then people want that card a lot for whatever reason. They want it so much you could sell yours for $8 each. So now, without having done anything, you have $80 in the form of trading cards.
But then people decide your cards are actually lame and don’t want to buy tgrm any more. If you were to sell them, you’d only get $1 each, so you only have $10 worth of trading cards. Thus, your cards are worth $70 less than they were, even though all the actual money is still out there and you have all the trading cards you originally bought.
To rephrase, the value of your investment fell by $70.
This is how stocks work. When the media reports that some money was wiped off the stock market, all the money still exists. It’s just that people decided some stocks are lame and not worth buying, which means the owners of those stocks can’t sell them for as much as they could have the previous day.
Imaginary money when people who imagined it find out is imaginary:
All money is imaginary
but some imaginary money is more imaginary than others
A Zimbabwean dollar for your thoughts
It’s on paper. It never existed to begin with. Just like saying the rock in a ditch I found is worth 200 million dollars. Then, when I couldn’t sell it, I revalued it at only 100 million dollars. So, the extra 100 million didn’t go anywhere. “Value” is a truly subjective thing which is encompassed by the old phrase “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.
Damn you got a $100m rock? I’ll give you $20 for it.
You just crashed the entire stone futures market.
It was never there. It was just dreams and imagination.
“future profits” or something
Unrealised gains lmao
Bro going to the gym and talking about unrealized gains
Stock valuation has always seemed like play/imaginay money to me. Until I sell my stock and buy that large purchase, I treat mine like just a number.
Imagine you’re the richest person on the planet, and own 1 trillion monies in stock of Omnia Corporation. Can you buy 1 trillion ice cream cones for 1 money each? No, because you can’t sell 1T stocks without utterly devastating the stock price… But you sure can take a loan backed by this imaginary money. Boggles my mind.
I wish someone with economics background would correct my thinking.
I don’t have economics background and think the same way as you do.
They just create money out of thin air.
Same with money. If the power goes out the can of tuna in the cupboard suddenly is worth more dead president paper. Maybe it was worth a dollar yesterday. But 2 weeks into no power I won’t sell it to you for 5 dollars.
The tuna in the refrigerator, on the other hand, is suddenly worth less. Where’s the consistency?
Not in that tuna after 2 weeks, I can tell you that much
ELI5
There are 10 Charizard Pokémon cards in existence (# of outstanding stock)
Each card is worth $100 today, $1,000 total value
Tomorrow the price falls to $90, $900 total value
$100 was “wiped”
If the charizard card is worth $80, $90, $100, or $110 will continue to play out.
If it did the opposite and price of each card went to $110 then you could say $100 was “injected” into the market.
that’s a lot of words for blowin smoke up your ass
You shouldn’t let a Charizard do that it’s not safe
