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.

> 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.

> 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

> 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.

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.

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...

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

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.