Listen to Theo read this article, external

“What you have there is about £250,000 worth of gold,” Emma Siebenborn says as she shows me a faded plastic tub filled with old, shabby jewellery – rings, charm bracelets, necklaces and orphaned earrings.

Emma is the strategies director of Hatton Garden Metals, a family-run gold dealership in London’s Hatton Garden jewellery district, and this unprepossessing tub of bric-a-brac is a small sample of what they buy over the counter each day. It is, in effect, gold scrap, which will be melted down and recycled.

Also on the table, rather more elegantly presented in a suede-lined tray, is a selection of gold coins and bars. The largest bar is about the size and thickness of a mobile phone. It weighs a hefty 1kg, and it’s worth about £80,000.

The coins include biscuit-sized Britannias, each containing precisely one ounce of 24 carat bullion, as well as smaller Sovereigns. These are all available to buy – and the recent surge in gold prices has led to a surge in demand.

Zoe Lyons, who is Emma’s sister and the managing director, has never seen anything like it – often she finds would-be sellers queuing in the street. “There’s excitement and buzz in the market but also nervousness and trepidation,” she tells me.

“There’s anxiety about which way the market is going to go next, and when you get those emotions, ultimately it creates quite big trades.”

At MNR jewellers a couple of streets away, a salesman agrees: “Demand for gold has increased, definitely,” he says.

By Josh Katzowitz, WCI Content Director

Every time a bull market enters a correction period or, even worse, becomes a bear market and white coat investors lose tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars in a short amount of time, the question inevitably appears:

“Is this time different?”

We know that the stock market has always gone up and to the right over time.

If you need proof, here’s a good illustration of how time in the market has always worked to your advantage.

If you stay in the market long enough, history tells us that we WILL make money even though we’ll probably also have to go through some deep dives. That’s why Dr. Jim Dahle is always preaching about staying the course, why other investors speak about buying the dip, why WCI columnist Rikki Racela writes about his lust for buying stocks on sale, and why Warren Buffett proclaims that you should be greedy when other people are fearful. A down market is a ripe market to make money.

All of that is good advice. But when the dot.com bubble burst or the Great Recession began or when the Coronabear era made investors’ lives extra difficult, the question always came: Is this time different?

The last 12 days have been chaotic. After President Trump raised tariffs across the globe during his so-called Liberation Day on April 2, the markets have mostly plunged into a downward spiral. In the two days following Trump’s announcement, the market suffered its biggest two-day decline in the past 70 years, and more than $6 trillion was almost instantly erased. While there was a bit of relief a few days ago (when most tariffs were paused for 90 days) and the market had one of its biggest one-day jumps in history, the rest of the week mostly brought more pain. On April 1, the Dow Jones stood at 40,225; at the end of April 11, it was at 40,212.

If you’ve recently looked at your 401(k) or your taxable brokerage account, you probably felt a wave of nausea. Across internet forums and comment sections, the same question is bubbling to the surface once again: Is this time different?

The best answer I can give is sort of but probably not. Now, in an effort to help squash feelings of panic-selling and to step out of whatever political bubbles are telling us that this market downturn is a stroke of genius or a stroke of madness, let’s turn to the financial experts we trust to see what they’ve said recently about what to do—and about whether this time is somehow unique in history.

Is This Time Different?

Here’s what Suze Orman wrote on Facebook on April 4:

“I know many of you are afraid of what’s happening in the economy and the stock market. So here’s my take: We are looking at another down day for the markets today. Why? Well, China has retaliated, and that’s got investors on edge. The markets are projected to go lower as a result. Now, I know many of you are dollar-cost averaging—and that’s still OK—but please hear me on this: if you’re going to continue that strategy right now, do it with seriously tiny amounts. This is not the time to be aggressive. We’re seeing signs that feel a lot like 2022. Volatile. Emotional. Uncertain. And yet . . . I want you to breathe. Markets will eventually recover. But not all at once. If these tariffs stay in place, it will take time. So remember: money you have in the market should have been money you did not need for at least five years. Let this play out. If you are contributing to a retirement account, do not stop. Stay the course. Keep investing steadily. That consistency is your power.”

Here’s what Mike Piper wrote on The Oblivious Investor on April 7:

“If you’re thinking, ‘This time is different!’ yes, you’re right. This time is always different. That’s the key thing to understand. In early 2020, we saw an extremely quick decline, coupled with a pandemic. That was certainly a new and scary experience. In 2008-2009, we saw a quick and large decline, coupled with major financial institutions collapsing and a non-trivial possibility of the whole thing becoming system-wide if too many large institutions failed. That was a new and scary experience. In 2000-2002, we saw a large decline that just kept on going and was coupled with things like major accounting fraud scandals. Could we trust that the market wasn’t just a scam, rigged against the little guy? It was a new and scary experience. That’s how these things go. A significant market decline doesn’t happen out of thin air. Such declines are generally accompanied by some scary real-world event. If you’re going to invest in the stock market, you have to be prepared to see large declines from time to time, coupled with something scary going on.”

Here’s what Warren Buffett wrote in February in his annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ letter. He’s obviously not addressing what’s happened this month, but it’s still instructive. Remember, Buffett raised eyebrows at the end of 2024 by amassing $334 billion in cash—observers opined at the time that he was worried about the Trump presidency and wanted a safety net or that he wanted all that cash so he could dump more of it into the market when the downturn came.

“Despite what some commentators currently view as an extraordinary cash position at Berkshire, the great majority of your money remains in equities,” Buffett wrote to his shareholders. “That preference won’t change.”

This is what JL Collins wrote in November 2024, soon after Trump was elected to his second term. Kudos to him for invoking a little Greek mythology in his analysis.

“. . . To me, it feels like we could see a significant bear market sometime down the road. Love him or loathe him, Mr. Trump is a disruptive force and Mr. Market hates disruption. Plus, one is due. We are at the pinnacle of a massive 15.5-year bull market and such runs don’t last forever. So, time to move to cash? Not for me. My discipline remains the same. No one can predict Mr. Market, least of all me. I will remain fully invested. Should my bearish speculation prove correct, I will have tied myself to the mast and will stay invested, and investing, as it rages and passes. Should the Mr. Market continue this historic bull run, I’ll be right there with it. This is The Simple Path to Wealth.”

Ramit Sethi wrote the following in his email newsletter on April 8:

“I’m not selling. This is the moment when even disciplined investors screw up. I’ve been seeing it all over Reddit and Twitter. People who’ve been screaming ‘buy and hold’ for years suddenly panic and sell everything after a few bad days. It might feel logical in the moment, but it’s almost always a devastating long-term decision. If you’re investing for the long term—and you should be—then you don’t need to panic. I’m not selling a thing. My portfolio is built for the long game, so I’m not touching it for another 10, 20, 30 years.”

As for what Jim Dahle thought during the Coronabear drop, here’s what he had to say in 2020:

“I’ve come to discover that it really doesn’t matter what I write in advance. I’ve been writing about bear markets; about behavioral finances; about why you need a financial plan and how to write one; about the importance of staying the course; about why it is smart not to try to time the market, pick individual stocks, or use actively managed mutual funds; about how to keep finances in their proper place in your life; and how to earn, save, invest, spend, and give well. But one big market downturn and it’s like it’s a brand new blog that nobody has ever read before. The WCI Forum is somehow now full of market timers. The WCI Facebook Group is somehow now full of stock pickers. The Bogleheads forum is convinced that this time it’s different . . . Guess what, guys? I’m still here. The message is still the same: Earn as much as you can while maintaining balance in your life

Save at least 20% of your gross earnings for retirement

Invest it into a fixed asset allocation, diversified between stocks, bonds, +/- real estate

Keep your costs low

Don’t try to time the market

Use low-cost, broadly diversified index funds

Use tax-protected, asset-protected investing accounts as much as possible

Develop and follow a written investing plan

Keep a long-term perspective

Get good advice at a fair price

Rebalance, tax-loss harvest, and donate appreciated shares to charity in lieu of cash.”

So, is this time different? Yes, each market drop is always different. Maybe the question should be: should you do anything different? The answer, at this point, is still no. Lash yourself to the mast and plug your ears with beeswax so you don’t hear the Sirens’ call to panic-sell. And hopefully, we’ll all be alright eventually.

More information here:

Getting Better at the 5 Money Activities

Your Crystal Ball Predictions for 2025

Money Song of the Week

The vast majority of people in the US aren’t going to feel sorry for a millionaire who isn’t happy. But perhaps the readers of this site can spare a little sympathy for a wealthy person who feels sad. So, when WCI columnist Adam Safdi suggested I listen to Kacey Musgraves’ 2024 song Lonely Millionaire for Money Song of the Week, I was all about it.

As Musgraves suggests, millionaires want to be loved and fulfilled. They don’t want to be stuck by themselves on their private jets and gold watches.

As she sings,

“Who wants to be a lonely millionaire?/Comin’ home, ain’t no one there/That you can talk to in your king-size bed. Be careful what you wish for, I see it all the time/The money and the diamonds and the things that shine/Can’t buy you true happiness.”

The subject matter of how money can’t buy you love and happiness is a constant trope in music. But that’s not what interested me when I started playing this song.

What really struck me about this song was that Musgraves didn’t perform like a country singer who used to croon about space cowboys and Mama’s broken heart. Instead, she reminded me of Sade at her most powerful who also samples beats from rapper JID and employs a powerful acoustic guitar. Maybe this type of music isn’t unusual for Musgraves (I’ve barely ever listened to her before, so I don’t have any kind of gauge on her, though she has said she makes country music for those who like country music and also those who don’t).

But I do know that the song surprised me in a good way.

“If you look at the records I’ve made since Day 1, they’ve always been a huge patchwork quilt of so many different influences,” Musgraves told Vogue. “I don’t think I can even really say 100% what my own music is.” Asked specifically about Lonely Millionaire, she said, “There were definitely some examples that I’ve seen of that in the industry. But I saw a quote the other day that said something like, ‘The ultimate wealth is being in tune with the flow of nature.’ The ultimate wealth is already in you, you know what I mean? It’s not an outside thing.”

Alas, this song is much deeper than I originally believed. Maybe I should listen to the rest of that Deeper Well album, because man, Musgraves certainly sounds like a smooth operator when she’s singing.

More information here:

Every Money Song of the Week Ever Published

Reddit of the Week

For many readers, I imagine 1998 doesn’t seem all that long ago. But then you take a look at this grocery store receipt from 27 years ago, and it seems as though you’re looking at something from an entirely different world.

As for how grocery prices today compare to inflation gains from 1998 until now, you can look in the comments of that Reddit thread. You can see that recreating the list today costs about $91. But that $30.82 from 1998 is worth $60.82 in 2025 dollars. Which means we’re paying more for groceries today than we did back then.

How worried are you about the latest stock market results? Are you staying the course? Do you think this time will be different?

[EDITOR’S NOTE: For comments, complaints, suggestions, or plaudits, email Josh Katzowitz at [email protected].]

From a ban on peeing in the sea to a hefty fine for stealing pebbles: Quirky foreign laws to know before your holiday

If you’re heading abroad this summer, the last thing you want to do is find yourself in trouble with the law.

That’s why it’s important to check up on any local laws or customs that might catch you out on your holiday.

We’ve compiled some of the more unusual rules below, so your trip goes off without a hitch:

Peeing into the sea: The city of Vigo in Spain introduced a ban on performing a “physiological evacuation at sea or on the beach” back in 2022. Ignore this and you could get a €750 (£650) fine, though how it is enforced is a mystery…

Watching unlicensed bingo: Yes, really. If you’re in Portugal this summer and happen to see a game of bingo going on in the park, avoid it! Bingo falls under gambling laws, so playing or watching non-licensed games can see you fined or even jailed, according to UK Foreign Office advice.

Stealing pebbles: Heading to one of Italy’s famous beaches? Stealing a pebble could see you fined huge sums – something we covered after more than 40 tourists got in trouble in Sardinia in 2021.

But the Foreign Office website explains it’s a broader rule – it’s illegal to “remove sand, shells or pebbles from coastal areas in Italy”. Fines could be as high as €1,000 (£865).

Its advice adds: “On the island of Capri, you must not use or bring on to the island any disposable plastic objects such as bags, cutlery, plates, cups, food packaging, trays and straws. If you do, you could be fined up to 500 euros.”

It’s also forbidden to collect various Italian species of flowers, plants and herbs from mountainous and wooded areas.

Feeding pigeons: It might be a common sight in the UK, but if you try this in Singapore, you could be fined up to $500 (£290).

Disputing your bill: In some places in Japan, raising a dispute over your bill can lead to your arrest. Always make sure your menu has prices on it before you eat or drink in bars and restaurants.

Now for some of the rules that you probably shouldn’t be breaking anywhere, including the UK…

Spitting in public: This one is a big no-no in Hong Kong, where either littering or spitting in the street can incur an on-the-spot fine of nearly £300.

Mooning: Exposing one’s bum in Greece is not tolerated by police, where you can land a fine or prison time for doing so under its rules targeting “rowdy and indecent behaviour”.

Tearing up bank notes: Another one you definitely shouldn’t be doing anywhere. Over in Turkey, “defacing” cash could land you in prison. It’s an offence to insult the Turkish nation or national flag, punishable by jail sentences between six months and three years.

Crossing on a red man: It’s bad karma in the UK and apparently so in Germany, too. Crossing a road when the red light is on can mean an immediate €5 (£4) fine or, if you cause an accident, €10 (£8).

Wearing camouflage: In a rule that should be adopted worldwide, the Caribbean bans people from wearing camouflage. It’s not for fashion reasons but because of its association with military uniforms.

Remember, the government’s foreign travel advice website has everything you need to know about a country before you travel.

If you need emergency help while abroad, you can reach out to the nearest British embassy, high commission or consulate.

A screen tracks trading on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) after the opening of trading in New York City, U.S., April 7, 2025. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights , opens new tab

LONDON, April 7 (Reuters) – A stock market rout, historic in scale, has swept across the globe wiping more than $10 trillion off major markets, as concerns about the economic damage unleashed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs spiral.

No corner of the world has been left unscathed by selling, with moves of a magnitude last seen during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis.

Sign up here.

Here’s how the selloff looks in charts.

WALL STREET MELTDOWN

The S&P 500 stock index (.SPX) , opens new tab fell over 10% in the last two trading sessions of last week, its worst performance since the end of the Second World War and rivaled by the 1987 stock market rout, the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2020 COVID shock. The benchmark whipsawed on Monday, falling as much as 4.8% before bouncing as much as 4%. It was last down 1.33% as of 1700 GMT.

Column chart showing 2-day move in S&P 500

Kevin Thozet, investment committee member at Carmignac, said he expected U.S. stocks to keep falling and the cost of borrowing for companies to keep rising. The hit to U.S. household wealth from the severe stock-market losses would impact consumer spending and economic growth.

U.S. households are heavily invested in equities and their combined wealth hit a record high at the end of 2024 after two years of dazzling stock market gains.

“There’s been a kind of toxic wedding between U.S. economic growth and U.S. equity markets because (cash) savings rates were so low.”

VOLATILITY HIGH

Wall Street’s fear gauge, the VIX index, is now trading at its highest since last August’s selloff in global stocks. The VIX index closed above 45 on Friday for the first time since the 2020 COVID crisis, also the biggest single-day jump since then.

In Europe, a similar indicator — the Euro STOXX Volatility Index (.V2TX) , opens new tab — was set for its biggest one-day surge in absolute terms since October 2008.

Wall Street’s VIX fear gauge and a measure of European stocks volatility has surged.

BANKS

Banking stocks globally have borne the brunt of the selling – with European and Japanese banking stocks having shed roughly 20% each over the last three trading sessions. In Europe, banking stocks – that had been riding high on optimism about brighter longer-term growth prospects following news last month of Germany’s huge fiscal boost – have lost 15% in three days, their largest such drop since COVID.

Column chart showing 3-day slide in European Bank Stocks

Recession fears are boosting expectations for faster interest rate cuts from big central banks — a backdrop that typically bodes ill for banks.

Markets bet on 122 basis points of rate cuts from the Fed this year, up from 74 basis points on April 2

CRUDE DECLINE

Another area that is feeling the pain of the coming weakening in demand from a global growth hit is oil. Brent crude was last down 2%, having hit its lowest since April 2021. Over three sessions, oil has lost almost 15% — the biggest three-day drop since the COVID crisis.

Line chart showing price of Brent crude over last five years

DOWN, DOWN UNDER

The Australian dollar has been a major casualty . Australian exports to the United States will be subject to the lighter 10% rate, compared with China’s hefty 34%, based on the list Trump unveiled last week.

But traders often use the Aussie dollar as a proxy for the less-liquid Chinese yuan, given Australia’s exposure to the Chinese economy. Since Trump unveiled his tariffs and China’s tit-for-tat response , the Aussie has lost nearly 4% in value.

It has dropped 4.5% in the last two days alone, marking its largest two-day fall since a 6% drop in 2020, in turn, the largest since 2010.

A chart showing the relative performance of major currencies against the dollar starting from midnight on April 1 to April 7, with the Australian dollar the worst performer

DONG TAKES A HIT

Markets in Vietnam, one of the major engines of “Factory Asia” and a huge exporter of goods to the United States – are reeling. Trump has slapped a duty of 46% on imports from Vietnam. Its trade surplus with the United States rose by an annual 20% in 2024 to a record above $123 billion , exporting anything from coffee to sporting apparel. Domestic stocks and the dong currency have dropped accordingly.

The dong has hit an all-time low and is around 5% below last September’s seven-month peak.

A weak currency does have the effect of making Vietnam’s exports even cheaper than they otherwise would have been. Yet it may not be enough to offset the damage of hefty U.S. tariffs.

A purple line chart showing the movement in the Vietnamese currency against the dollar, which hit a record low this week

NEW FRONTIER

The sovereign bonds of several so-called frontier markets have suffered selling. Bonds issued by Pakistan, which exports textiles to the United States, dropped 13 cents before retracing, pushing some of its debt to or below 70 cents on the dollar, a level below which a borrower is considered to be distressed.

Sri Lanka’s recently restructured bonds also faced steep losses as the exporter is hit by tariffs, as did oil exporters such as Angola. The hammering poses serious questions for the borrowing costs and economic outlook of some of the countries; Sri Lanka had been clawing its way back from the worst economic crisis in a generation, and Pakistan and Angola have struggled with high debt burdens in recent years.

Sovereign bonds issued by frontier economies setback by tariffs, trade war and sliding oil prices

Reporting by Dhara Ranasinghe, Amanda Cooper; Libby George, Naomi Rovnick, Samuel Indyk and Danilo Masoni; Editing by Sharon Singleton

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. , opens new tab

Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., April 7, 2025. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights , opens new tab

NEW YORK, April 8 (Reuters) – A dramatic U.S. stock slide is fanning fears of even more dire scenarios for the market, as investors weigh the potential for a prolonged global trade war and a much dimmer corporate profit outlook.

Stocks swung wildly on Monday, with the benchmark S&P 500 (.SPX) , opens new tab down well over 4% at one point, as investors continued to grapple with President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs that last week drove the biggest weekly drop for the stock market since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago.

Sign up here.

With so much unclear about where the tariff battle will lead, Wall Street strategists contemplated how much more of a beating stocks could take, including that the S&P 500 could fall by nearly half from its February 19 all-time high. The index ended on Monday at 5,062.25, down more than 17% from that peak.

Matthew Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak, said a decline in the S&P 500 in coming months to 4,300 was “very possible,” and a fall to 4,000 or lower was not out of the question. Trade tumult aside, Maley said, markets had been overly optimistic about the near-term profit potential from artificial intelligence and not properly factoring in weakening consumer behavior.

“This is more than tariffs,” he said. “This is the process of the market falling back in line with its underlying fundamentals.”

The worst-case scenarios from some analysts saw the S&P 500 dropping as much as roughly 50% from its all-time high, which would be akin to the aftermath of the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000.

The recent drop has been one of the steepest concentrated selloffs for U.S. stocks, on par with the speed and intensity of drawdowns seen during the COVID-19 swoon in 2020 and the financial crisis slide in 2008, and has put the S&P 500 close to bear market territory.

The S&P 500’s combined 10.5% decline last Thursday and Friday was the index’s fourth biggest two-day drop since 1950, according to Keith Lerner, co-chief investment officer with Truist Advisory Services. The biggest two-day falls occurred in March 2020, when COVID-19 was hitting; in November 2008, during the financial crisis; and in 1987, for the two-day period that included Wall Street’s “Black Monday.”

Despite the wild swings on Monday, the S&P 500 ended down just 0.2%. Even so, the Cboe Volatility index (.VIX) , opens new tab , Wall Street’s “fear gauge,” registered its highest closing level in five years.

Bar chart showing that Monday’s extraordinary intra-day volatility in the S&P 500 ranked as the 19th largest on record.

JPMorgan equity strategists on Monday outlined a year-end S&P 500 target of about 4,000 as their “bear case,” which included assumptions of no tariff relief and a 2026 earnings view that implied two years of no real profit growth.

Evercore ISI offered a “bear” outcome of 4,500 for the S&P 500 and a “SuperBear” case of 3,100, which would be a drop of nearly 50% from the February high. The SuperBear scenario involves a recession that takes down annual corporate profits by about 15%, as well as disruption in credit markets and difficulty raising the debt ceiling, Evercore strategists said in a note on Sunday.

Michael Purves, CEO of Tallbacken Capital Advisors, said a combination of “some (valuation) contraction, some earnings contraction” could push the index down to 4,000.

“It’s not an unrealistic scenario at all,” Purves said.

Like Purves, investors pointed to two potential reasons that create the potential for further weakness in stocks: valuations that are moderating from expensive levels and the possibility of more severe cuts to earnings estimates.

The forward price-to-earnings ratio for the S&P 500 fell from 22.4 times expected 12-month earnings in February, to 18.4 as of Friday, which is in line with the index’s average P/E ratio of the past 10 years, according to LSEG Datastream.

But the longer-term 40-year average P/E ratio is 15.8 — still 14% below Friday’s level. The P/E ratio sank to as low as 15.3 as recently as 2022, when the Federal Reserve was raising interest rates to bring down spiking inflation.

Current valuations also are based on earnings expectations that many investors say have yet to adequately reflect the likely economic damage from the tariffs.

S&P 500 earnings are still expected to rise 10.4% in 2025, according to an LSEG IBES report on Friday. However, during recessions, earnings fall at an average annual rate of 24%, according to Ned Davis Research.

“If it’s a 50% probability of recession, you’ve got to look at another 20%-25% down in equities from here,” Colin Graham, head of multi-asset strategies at Robeco in London, said during trading on Monday.

To be sure, even investors who feared steep fallout for stocks did not think these were the most likely scenarios.

Evercore strategists, for example, on Sunday set a year-end price target of 5,600 for the S&P 500, or a 10% gain from current levels, even as they described more negative potential outcomes.

Markets also could be poised to rally on any news of possible trade relief. Stocks briefly rose on Monday on a report that said Trump was considering a 90-day pause on tariffs, before the White House denied the report, sending the market lower.

“The only thing that’s going to help both sentiment and the market’s direction is going to be some easing of the entrenched tariff views,” said Michael James, managing director of equity trading at Rosenblatt Securities. “We’re going to need some form of moderation on those tariff levels to have any potential for meaningful improvement.”

Reporting by Lewis Krauskopf and Saqib Iqbal Ahmed; additional reporting by Carolina Mandl and Sinéad Carew; editing by Megan Davies and Leslie Adler

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. , opens new tab