Lowing and Highing
As we saw in The Proper Etiquette for Market Panics – which I wrote the last time we had some major market falls – what usually happens in a crisis is that markets fall and then exhibit volatility, as investors roam backwards and forwards in increasingly large herds while asking everyone else why it's happened and what they should do about it. Often the noise they make sounds suspiciously like cattle lowing.
Well, this happens (the volatility, not the lowing) because going down – and up – is what markets do, and if you don't understand that you shouldn't be allowed to play Monopoly, let alone invest in stocks. And asking what you should do about this after the event betrays a depressing level of incompetence and a woeful grasp of history. On the other hand a bit of cognitive dissonance can be just the trigger to for a teachable moment; the point at which a handful of people actually learn to be proper investors.
