Humans, Machines and Markets: Stocks Going Crazy Is Nothing New
- The last three months have been rough, but not historically so
- Plenty of market dislocations have come without help of robots
Photographer: Boris Rossler/DPA via Getty Images
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The 2018 casualty list in markets is long. Hedge funds, Apple and Amazon’s trillion-dollar price tags, trading results everywhere. Not even Christmas was spared the wrath of cascading stocks. It has felt unprecedented, like Armageddon, or maybe even the robot apocalypse. It wasn’t.
While any 20 percent sell-off hurts, the one happening now is far from unheard of in terms of depth or velocity. Over the past 100 years, there are almost too many examples to count of stocks tumbling with comparable force.