TLDR I have done incredibly well in the market in the past 17 months and want to educate myself about the intricacies of the ebbs and flows of stocks. Any good suggestions for starting places to learn?
I pulled our 401k's (2040 target) in November 2022. Started with $90k in Amazon and then started liquidating other 401k's (we're in tech and switch jobs every couple/few years). I continued investing in everything AI adjacent, including Nvidia, palantir, c3, meta (wife worked there), Microsoft, AMD, super micro (didn't get in on this until this mid Feb), and a few others. I bought Amazon because I think they're future looks bright and didn't see it performing worse than the 2040 fund and then I basically just kept buying stocks related to AI.
Long story short, pulling out of those dog poop funds was the best financial decision I ever made.
We're not touching any of these stocks for at least 15 years (even the ones in our brokerage account) because 1) we're 50ish and 2) I look at companies like Microsoft where even if you had invested at the top of the dot.com bubble, if you hadn't touched i the stock, you'd still be in great shape despite major market downtowns along the way.
Now having said all that, I look at this portfolio every day, and aside from a couple company's earnings calls, it looks to my untrained eye that it's a lot of speculation based on a collective assumption of future growth in AI and that I just got in early.
I know this is a stretch to ask on Reddit, but even with these 1-5% daily gains that I think are coming from people and institutions still racing to get their money into AI, what is triggering declines like today (-.2.5%)? Is it large blocks of money taking profits out, or people selling because they have set up some kind of triggers to get ahead of a declining market, or a million other things (most likely)?
Even though I don't plan on "day trading", I'd like to learn more about what's causing these ebbs and flows of money and I don't feel like anything on TV (and most of the "shows" on the Internet) give us an unbiased view of what's really going on. Any suggestions of where to start learning?
Thanks!
