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Selloff wipes out nearly $1 trillion from software and services stocks
...so far.
It's not the existential threat that caused the selloff. It was the fact that the shit barely works half the time and isn't remotely as useful as they'd claimed it would be. Over hyped auto correct is being pushed as a thinking entity that can make decisions. It's not
It's not the ai companies the ones falling, it's the other software developing companies. It seems that investors, in their infinite wisdom, are thinking developing software is not gonna be necessary in the future, like, you just ask gpt for the program you need and it'll build it on the fly or something...
MS is one of the biggest AI pushing companies out there. They're down, what, nearly 15% in the last week?
So, incorrect.
Partial incorrect, but the article is about law data and wealth fund managers who have a lot of exposure to (not necessarily AI) software companies that have been losing value and laying off workers for the last few months.
I think this will be a mistake, as is buying into the AI companies, especially OpenAI, since I think it’s going to become clear how shit is app is, and bring the rest of them down with it.
moreso the fact you can sell stuff you don't own, when it comes to "why X stock dropped". it's a casino, the post-drop articles saying why are mostly just narrative building
"Sell stuff you don't own"?...it sounds like you don't understand what stock is
no, it sounds like you don't understand basic fundamentals of the casino.
No it really sounds like you have no fucking clue what stock is. Unless you're talking about options, which I'll point out, no one, including yourself, has actually mentioned, but you'd still be wrong about what those represent.
Partial ownership of a company is not "something you don't even own"
let me spell it out for you, since you apparently can't connect the dots yourself....short selling, you can do it without options
and brokers have many ways to technically "find shares" to borrow that essentially boil down to just ignoring all do-not-borrow designations people might utilize
shorting is artificial sell pressure used with abandon in US markets under the justification of "increasing liquidity", when in practice it's a tool used to extract liquidity. at a high enough level, all you need to be profitable trading is volume to trade into, and when the market is "exciting" more people trade
after 2000-2008 the majority of the rest of world massively cracked down on naked shorting, the US just slightly tightened leverage ratios (which there are dozen different ways for big funds to ignore)
There is a strange dichotomy for investors here, on the one hand they want to take advantage of an AI boom, on the other hand, the consequences of that boom are the destruction in value of loads of other companies.
The stocks are still way up on their initial investments from a year ago. Some disillusionment is to be expected, and I think, this wasn’t anywhere near enough of a sell.
Modern capitalism is anchored on the free and frictionless flow of capital - another one of those wonderful ideas stemming from the Reagan Revolution. As a result of it, capital doesn't care about what happens to the market in a meaningful time frame, only what is happening today. If the economy collapses, that's totally fine, as long as there is still something with an upward potential. And there is always something with an upward potential, even if it's just investing in carrion feeders like pawn shops or subprime lending.
In fact, because it's so much easier and faster to destroy than to build, modern capitalism probably prefers the former. You take something that works, load up on shorts, wreck it into the ground, profit. That is definitely the lesson I learned from the hostile takeover of RJR Nabisco in the 80s.
Like a great many features of modern capitalism (aka Late Stage Capitalism), this is a direct consequence of frictionless capital flows. This could be entirely avoided by restoring taxes on stock sales within a certain amount of time. You sell after five years, no taxes; before then, regular sales tax. That simple change stops the spiral of doom.
among many other things, for example...just ban naked short-selling entirely. why the fuck should anyone be able sell stuff they don't own?
most of the rest of the world figured out that was a terrible idea after 2000-08, US said hold my beer
Nope. The problem is they want to make money. China does too but it's not China's number one priority.
Investors can and will pull their money out. China will not.
The beauty of that, is simply that it proves that the market is ENGINEERED TO BE irrational.
Until the markets are engineered to be rational, with all required ratios being posted, all relevant competitive-information, etc, then bubble/crash/bubble/crash is enforced on our economy, perhaps industry-by-industry, but it is enforced.
& who has the courage & integrity to enforce that markets be made rational?
< crickets >
Nobody: that's who.
So, it's actually all just a pretence, used for the concentration-of-wealth, & so long as the pretence is profitable for the "haves & the have-more's" ( the ones G.W. Bush admitted, to them, that he served ), then nothing'll change.
Rational-market REQUIRES objective-information being where-it-is-needed, consistently, reliably.
That takes guts & integrity, in setting-up the rules of being in the stock-markets.
_ /\ _
For the people saying "haha, fuck ai, such worthless garbage." You should know that the headline is actually referring to industries impacted by AI working as expected by its hype-men.
But at the same time, we should remember that this is a just-so story. It is a post-hpc explaination given to explain a market dip. It doesn't really mean that is why the market dipped.
What if... This article was also written by ai?
Only the young and management think AI is good for anything.
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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