I haven't gotten anything done today. Not writing, not the side project, not even replying to emails that are one line long. Every six minutes or so my thumb finds its way to the stock app on my phone without me really deciding to do it, like it's on autopilot, and I check the same four tickers over and over. AAPL, AMZN, GOOGL, NFLX. It's a compulsion at this point, not information gathering.
The Dow dropped 608 points yesterday. That's about 2.4%, and the Nasdaq is now more than 10% below where it was back in August, which is the number reporters keep using to say we've officially hit "correction" territory. I don't know why that specific threshold matters so much to headline writers, but it does, and yesterday every tab I had open used the word within the first sentence.
What actually got my attention wasn't the index numbers though, it was Tesla. They reported Q3 earnings after the bell Wednesday and posted an honest to god profit, $311 million on something like $6.8 billion in revenue, way past what analysts had penciled in. The stock jumped hard in after hours trading. I've watched that company burn cash for years while people argued in comment sections about whether it would exist in five years, so seeing an actual profitable quarter felt strange, like watching a friend who's always late finally show up on time and not knowing what to do with the fifteen minutes you'd budgeted for waiting around.
Amazon and Google both report their own numbers after market close today, and I will absolutely be refreshing my phone around 4:05pm even though I own maybe six shares of one of them total and it won't meaningfully change my life either way. That's the part that gets me. It's not really about money for most of us doing this. It's closer to doomscrolling, except the doom has a dollar sign in front of it.
My actual complaint, and this has nothing to do with earnings season, is how every financial news segment explains a selloff with the exact same three sentences now. Rising interest rates. Trade war with China. Valuations got ahead of themselves. I've heard some version of that paragraph on three different channels this week worded almost identically, like there's a shared script circulating that nobody admits to reading from. Maybe there is. I half expect the anchors to start reciting it in unison at some point, a little financial news choir.
None of this changes what I actually think, which is that the panic is mostly noise layered on top of a market that had gone up for way too long without a real pullback. Tech stocks especially had gotten silly. The FAANG stuff was priced like none of these companies would ever slow down, ever face a quarter of disappointing guidance, ever get hit by a tariff or a softening ad market. That's not how any of this works, it never has been, and a 10% pullback after the run we've had since early 2017 is closer to normal than anything resembling a crisis. I said something close to that to a coworker over lunch yesterday and he looked at me like I'd said something insensitive, which, fair, some people's 401k statements probably do look rough this month.
Still doesn't stop me from checking the app again in about five minutes. Old habits and all that, except this one's only about three weeks old, which says more about October than it does about me.