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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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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.
The point you're missing is that the loss is real for the investors holding those assets.
If you bought ten cards for $5 each, you invested $50. When their market value rises to $80, you have an investment worth $80. If that value subsequently falls to $10, you've lost $70 in investment value. You can no longer sell those cards for what you could have sold them for yesterday.
And if you were someone who bought those ten cards at $8 each, you've now lost $70 of your original $80 investment. That isn't hypothetical money. That's money you actually spent and can no longer recover by selling your cards.
The money is not "still there", the money transferred hands and you (or your retirement account) are holding the empty bag.
The thing is though you haven't actually lost money or gained money until you sell the shares and until you do sell, you still have those shares so you could always get your money back if the stock goes back up. The only time you will lose money when holding stock is if the company goes out of buisiness
If you believe the capitalist assertion that stock always go up, sure. If you're not close to retirement and aren't counting on those funds anytime soon, sure.
I believe the AI circular financing bubble isn't meaningfully going to turn a corner and become profitable enough to pay the debts already accumulated, and once it truly pops that money will never come back to the average investor trusting the financial bros to put all their eggs into that overinflated basket.
A stock is a part of a company. You still have have that part.
There's nothing "supposedly" about it. It does represent a part of the ownership. If you own all the pieces of paper then you own the company.
However much you paid for it and how much it's worth are completely different stories, but the stock is indeed the ownership.
It's literally hypothetical money