Do we get to all take a breath now? Is FOMO over?

The Fear Of Missing Out drove a lot of the market over the past 18 months, particularly as new investors showed up with time and money to burn while they were stuck at home in the pandemic, and found themselves attracted, like generations of investors before them, to the most casino-like parts of the market — stuff like Reddit-driven meme stocks and cryptocurrencies and SPAC dreams and wild options speculations. And, of course, those mega-growth tech stocks that benefitted from the pandemic and soared so high, and have flopped so hard.

If we’re starting to burn a lot of that off now, and folks are going back to work and thinking about other things, and maybe feeling the residual burn on their fingers from holding on to hot things for too long, then maybe we can reset a little. We can slow down, look at what companies really do, what they can earn, and what they may be really worth, and perhaps the world of investing will be a bit more boring and a lot easier to stomach.

We can dream, no?

Things still seem to be driven by headlines and the Federal Reserve for the moment, so there’s an awful lot of volatility — professionals have been through enough cycles that they don’t like to “fight the Fed” (which means, basically, “don’t buy stocks when the central bank is raising interest rates”), and the rest of us are seeing all the scary headlines, both in the real world (war with Russia!) and the financial world (like Netflix (NFLX) posting disappointing earnings last night and falling by 20%). One might be forgiven for thinking, after spending a year and a half doing almost nothing but watch Netflix, “If Netflix can drop that much, what hope does anyone else have?”

It’s all noise, at least when it comes to stock price movement over a few weeks or months. There are a lot of indicators that tell us the market is just in the early days of falling apart… but also a lot of indicators that tell us the worst is over, and global economic growth coming out of the pandemic could still be remarkable. We don’t get to know which of those indicators are really going to matter in any given year, humans are wildly unpredictable when ...