Its hard to condense a gazillion data points into a non-financial site post.
Its over when the cause of it is over.
What if the cause isn't tariffs, and tariffs were merely the spark lighting an abundance of dry tinder? The spark could have been anything or nothing.
Valuations were sky high on rear view mirror earnings. Then you had the Fed sucking out liquidity via unwinding of the old absurdly high QE. When you have Walmart and Costco PE's at hot tech stock valuations and ABOVE, the best you can say is all value was priced in, and the worst you can say is nutty values hit the wall.
Valuations on one year forward projections are now back in line and arguably cheap enough. Provided CFO's and analysts don't start cutting projections. Earnings season begins now and we shall see.
Stocks go up when there are more buyers than sellers, and vice versa. Simple point. In March hedge funds sold like mad. Retail like we folks were buying the dip like mad. Until yesterday when a lot of retail threw in the towel. Pro funds of all types vastly outweigh retail. Like 70% to 30% or thereabouts.
We are in a news and emotion driven phase. Not a spreadsheet valuation phase. Arrival of news is random and unpredictable. Good or bad it can have an out-sized market impact well beyond its econ importance. But it would be useful to do an exercise for yourself as to what might cause a change in the psy of it at the professional / hedge fund levels to cause covering shorts and buy in some long positions.
Friday trading volumes were either an all time high or nearly so, depending on who you listen to. The thing about records is they are meant to be broken. In the Covid crash of 2020 records were broken only to see them broken again a week later. Very short term buy vs sell activity oscillators point to Friday being a capitulation event setting up for a bounce. That can be dead wrong. No one can predict what news events will occur before futures open again on Sunday night. Absent up indications, expect margin call forced selling out of the gate and no shot at stability until mid-morning. Bitcoin trades 24x7 nonstop, and sometimes a useful sentiment indicator. Its been remarkably stable, down ever so slightly since Friday stock market close, not signaling either more panic nor bull excitement. No real news this morning, so no shock there.
The trend is down. Respect that fact.
Back to the OP's issues. No one can opine on your overall financial situation. If you can swing it without selling stocks cheap and won't miss the cash on hand its one thing. If you are counting on back to back years of 20% stock returns its quite a different thing. Stocks are back to levels of a year ago. If you could swing it then, you can swing it now.
But if you can't sleep if you buy it, maybe you shouldn't.
Absolutely no one can predict the future. It is arrogance to think you can. We can say with certainty where the market closed as of Friday. One can use that to make personal decisions based on what you know with certainty to be true. My advice is to turn off the TV and avoid market forecasters. Buy when metrics tell you its cheap enough, not just because price is X% less than the high. Walmart and Costco are not cheap, still. Other stuff may well be. Choose wisely. Cheap doesn't mean it can't get cheaper, because sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. If you don't love what you own enough to have confidence in it, you own the wrong stuff, or don't understand it enough to actually have that confidence.
It’s tough to convince myself to shell out $500K on a boat the same day the bottom drops out of the market.
There was no recovery for them at their age.
