This headline is wildly inaccurate. $1 trillion in tech stocks were not "sold off." Rather, the collective market caps of some tech stocks dropped by $1 trillion.
Market cap is mostly a useless number. It's the current stock price multiplied by the number of outstanding shares. But only a small % of shares are bought and sold in a given day, so the current stock price is mostly irrelevant to the shares that aren't moving.
If you hold some stock, and the current stock price goes down, but you don't sell your stock, then you haven't lost any actual money. The so-called "value" of your stock may have dropped, but that's just a theoretical value. Unless you're desperate to sell now, you can wait out the downturn in price.
> so the current stock price is mostly irrelevant to the shares that aren't moving.
If it moves enough, shares that aren't moving might become shares that are though. Unless a company's stock is all held by Die Hard True Believers who will HODL through the apocalypse and beyond, the market price can matter.
We'd also have to run the same argument on the upside too. Does the current stock price matter to those who aren't selling when it goes 2x in a year?
What apocalypse, exactly? The stock market has eventually recovered from every "crash." Occasionally a big company crashes and never recovers, e.g., Lehman Brothers, but I wouldn't expect that to happen to Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, or Oracle.
I didn't say that stock price is totally irrelevant, but if you're investing for the long term, short-term fluctuations mostly shouldn't change your strategy.
In any case, the headline is inaccurate. Unsold stock losing market value is not the same as stock sold off.
Market cap is mostly a useless number. It's the current stock price multiplied by the number of outstanding shares. But only a small % of shares are bought and sold in a given day, so the current stock price is mostly irrelevant to the shares that aren't moving.
If you hold some stock, and the current stock price goes down, but you don't sell your stock, then you haven't lost any actual money. The so-called "value" of your stock may have dropped, but that's just a theoretical value. Unless you're desperate to sell now, you can wait out the downturn in price.