I clicked and starting reading this expecting some actual connection between said markdown files and losing money. There was nothing at all like that in this blog post.

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H8crilA 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't understand why people think they know why stocks move up or down. There are clear cases from time to time, but in general the market doesn't explain itself. The reasons may not even be explainable in a way that's comprehensive to a human.

Reminds me of this question - why did the USSR collapse? You can describe dozens of influences which acted all at the same time, but there isn't a one paragraph summary answer.

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dragonwriter 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I don't understand why people think they know why stocks move up or down.

Inferring overly generalized and usually incorrect causal relations from extremely limited data and treating them as conclusive is a very strong human tendency; the idea of avoiding that and taking a systematic, structured, and conditional approach to assessing causal claims is fairly recent and, even among people who generally support it, often adhered to more as an aspirational principal than a consistent practice. And it certainly doesn't sell clicks the way the old way does.

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PunchyHamster 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Reminds me of this question - why did the USSR collapse? You can describe dozens of influences which acted all at the same time, but there isn't a one paragraph summary answer.

Decisions made in greed caught up with people in power

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wordpad 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Why USSR collapsed

Price of oil collapsed leading to mass shortages of everything. They also decided to allow more individual freedoms to protest which people promptly used to overthrow the system.

	▲	SirFatty 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm pretty sure that was a rhetorical question.

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fullshark 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Humans seek to understand phenomena and they use narratives to accomplish that. Accepting that there are multiple factors always involved and chaos reigns is disturbing.

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ajkjk 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

phase change

edit: specifically, I imagine that macroscopic political and economic changes can be aptly modeled as phase changes due to changes in correlation distance[0] holding the system together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_function_(statisti...

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wat10000 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It generates clicks. Correctness is irrelevant, especially when it’s impossible to prove wrong.

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motoboi 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are two perfect explanations for that. It’s just that people won’t believe in them and keep saying we have no good explanations.

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brazzy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The connection is implied: technology companies quite suddenly lost a $285bn in market valuation, which means that the owners of these companies (either as stock or other forms of equity) have a combined $285bn less net worth. And apparently people are linking this sudden decrease in market valuation to "Anthropic launching a legal tool", which essentially consists of said markdown files.

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krupan 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Clearly the author is implying that, but with zero evidence to back that implication up. Not even an attempt to link the two other than saying "this happened" and "this exists." And hacker news is upvoting it like it's actually an interesting article. Have we lost our brains?

	▲	martinald an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Hi, author here. Sorry if I skipped over the "evidence". If you read/watch financial news, every single outlet was claiming that it was caused by this legal tool launch. I was commenting on that - somewhat in jest. I'll update the article to make it clearer what I was trying to get at. Thanks for the feedback, it was front page of the FT and I need to remember not everyone reads financial news!

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AndrewDucker 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But without knowing which stocks dropped, how can we make that link?

In another submission, Amazon, Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet are all dropping. Are we supposed to think of them as SAAS companies now?

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/ai-sell-off-stocks-amazon-or...

	▲	alephnerd 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		1. Yes we treat them as Enterprise SaaS and have done so since the late 2000s. 2. The selloff was largely due to Amazon's massive capex commitment for GPU compute buildout, as Amazon (and a couple other BigTechs) are used as market benchmarks and because a large portion of us have been holding since 2021-22 or even earlier so we have reached a point where we have hit returns that we were advised to hit in our portfolios. HNWIs with advisors and Institutional Investors (who advisors use) aren't daytrading.
	▲	PunchyHamster 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		all of them have significant SaaS offering. But the claim that's related to anthropic posting some markdown files is idiotic at best, malicious at worst

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AnimalMuppet 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This right here? This is why I read the comments first.

	▲	robocat 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I try to challenge myself by reading the article to form an opinion, and then I learn by testing my opinion for faults (using good HN comments). Sometimes I test myself by writing comments. My recent binge has been trying to understand what's going on when smart people simplify complex topics down to single root causes (causes that often feel like memes to me). I also enjoy a good rationalisation myself!
	▲	bryanrasmussen 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		works if someone starts by reading the article first, but otherwise that strategy isn't any good either.

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llm_nerd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The connection isn't just implied. It's explicitly the entire foundation of the article.

And it's positively ludicrous.

I mean, to be clear the submission basically does exactly what most financial columnists do. Take every movement of the market, ascribe it to something/anything (when in the real world it's massively multifactorial) because that is pat and seems informative.

The market is massively overvalued, crypto has seen hundreds of billions dissolve, OpenAI has serious questions about its realistic ongoing viability (and a number of majors have a lot of their valuation based upon basically going all in on it -- Oracle, Microsoft, nvidia), the US is headed by a diddler simpleton who has no idea how anything works and thinks it's 1982, and so on. Volatility is a given.