Yeah, Trump basically told before he announced the pause. I made a lot of money in the past week doing very little but pay close attention to this flaky dude.

Do you think normal people (think, your average investing American) are trading based on this news? They probably shouldn't be... I would think that by far most of the trading these past few days has been institutions, so, a big transfer from some financial institutions to others?

Aren't your 401k's tied up in stocks and bonds? Index funds too will probably have been fleeced too on the volatility.

But surely you didn't sell off your 401k.

Managed funds and ETFs will have needed to rebalance, buying and selling assets to get the proportions back to what they are supposed to be.

> Do you think normal people (think, your average investing American) are trading based on this news?

We ~know that they were: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-market-pummeled-401k-acco...

As always, normal people sell low and likely buy high (I'd bet that a lot of the already-fading market euphoria yesterday was retail trading).