Monday morning I woke up, made coffee, and made the mistake of checking my brokerage app before I'd even had a sip. Big mistake. Everything was red. Not "eh, a rough day" red, but the kind of red where you scroll past your Nvidia position twice because you assume you're misreading the percentage.
I wasn't. Nvidia was down double digits intraday. So was pretty much every chip and AI-adjacent name I own, which, fine, is a decent chunk of my portfolio because I got greedy over the past year like everyone else did.
Here's what actually happened, as far as I can piece together from a weekend of reading and a Monday of doomscrolling. The Bank of Japan raised interest rates on July 31st, which doesn't sound like it should matter to my Nvidia shares, but it turns out half of Wall Street had been borrowing cheap yen for years and dumping the money into US tech stocks (the "carry trade," if you want the term for it). Raise Japanese rates even a little and suddenly that trade stops being free money, so everyone unwinds it at once. Add a weak US jobs report the previous Friday, unemployment ticking up to 4.3%, and suddenly every finance guy on TV is saying the word "recession" like it's a foregone conclusion instead of one data point.
Japan's Nikkei had its worst single day since 1987 on Monday, down something like 12%. Not a typo. Nineteen-eighty-seven. US markets didn't crash quite that hard but the Dow shed over a thousand points and the Nasdaq slid into correction territory, which is the polite Wall Street way of saying "everyone panicked at once."
I did not sell anything, for what it's worth, and I want to be a little smug about that because by Wednesday things were already clawing back. Nvidia especially. It's wild how fast a stock can go from "the world is ending" to "actually never mind" in 72 hours. I'm not smart, I just didn't check my phone again until Tuesday night because I was busy and honestly a little scared to look.
My actual complaint here isn't about the market, its about the coverage of the market. Every single financial media outlet had some variant of a guy in a tie standing in front of a red screen saying "is this the big one." CNBC does this every single time there's a two-day dip and I am so tired of it. Nobody on those panels ever says "actually this might just be leveraged yen trades unwinding and not a sign the economy is collapsing," because that's not exciting television. I had three separate people text me some version of "should I sell everything" on Monday and I get it, the graphics are scary, but a lot of this was mechanical, not fundamental. That's not investment advice, I'm just a guy with a blog, but it's what I actually think.
Also, and I'll only give this one paragraph because I promise you every other tech site on the internet is covering it wall to wall this week: a federal judge also ruled this week that Google has been illegally operating as a monopoly in search, largely because of the billions it pays Apple and others every year to be the default search engine on your phone. I think that detail, the sheer size of that check, is the part that actually stuck with me more than the legal verdict itself. Twenty-some billion dollars a year just so the little magnifying glass on your iPhone opens up Google instead of something else. I've never once gone into Safari settings to change my default search engine. I bet almost nobody has. That's kind of the whole case in one sentence, honestly.
Anyway. By Wednesday my portfolio was mostly back to where it started the week, minus a little, plus a lot of gray hair I didn't need. Nvidia's still bouncing around but nowhere near Monday's low. I'm keeping the coffee ritual, I'm just waiting until after the first cup to open the app now.