Why Your Stock is Always Red

Disclaimer: This post does not constitute financial advice. Author has a long position in Gilead. Do your own due diligence before making an investment.

You’re here because you’ve noticed that something is terribly wrong with the stock market.

The company you were excited about owning always seems to be red. It’s down in the pre-market, it’s down during the day, and it’s down after-hours.

This isn’t necessarily because you’re a bad stock picker. It might mean the opposite. You might have a discovered a diamond in the rough. A company with fantastic earnings. Stellar management. Tremendous growth opportunities. Positive press releases. New developments. New products. Awards. Recognition. Plans for the future.

Yet the stock continues to drop.

Sure, every now and then there’s a tiny green day, but for the most part the stock is always red.

Understandably, this is frustrating. It can make you feel like a loser. Like you made a bad investment. Like you should just give up and buy index funds.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s entirely possible that your investment thesis is flawed, but if your stock is always red in the face of overwhelming positive news and growth potential, then it’s more likely that your stock is being manipulated by Wall Street.

Wall Street does this because they’ve also identified the stock as being great. Banks and hedge funds have teams of brilliant analysts working for them. They have super computers. Algorithms. They have programmers with a genius-level intellect. Economists. Statisticians. They run calculations and projections. They are exceptionally good at finding great companies.

We’ll call these companies gems.

Like most things, there is not an infinite supply of gems.

If you buy 100 shares of a gem, that means someone else cannot own those shares. If banks and hedge funds own less gems, they make less money.

Holding on to your gems might sound easy, but it’s not that simple. There will be immense pressure for you to sell. Wall Street’s stock manipulation is the equivalent of an annoying neighbor blasting loud music through your walls all day. Your neighbor isn’t a musician. And it’s not necessarily illegal. They just want you to pack up and move on.

Wall Street’s timeframe is different than yours. They have a lot more patience.

If you buy a stock on Monday and it drops 15% by Friday then you might begin to panic.

“I’m going to lose everything!”

“I’m an idiot!”

You check the stock message boards and see comments like, “This stock is going to zero.”

“Total garbage.”

“Only a moron would buy this stock.”

These comments reinforce your own thoughts that you might have made a mistake.

You look at what’s trending and see that some dumpster company is up 20% on basically nothing.

Now you’re really annoyed.

And maybe you sell…

…and Wall Street buys your gem.

Months go by and the stock stays flat. You think you’ve made a good decision. But then the earnings report comes out and the company has blown away expectations. Your gem jumps 30%.

You’re angry and want to buy back in, but months of red have conditioned you to believe that the stock will drop back down again.

So you wait.

But now the stock is creeping upwards every day.

You didn’t buy on Monday, and now the stock is more expensive on Friday.

Thinking you’ve missed the boat, you start looking for a new stock. After doing a lot of research you find what you believe is a great opportunity.

You buy in, and the cycle starts over.

It’s just red every day until you give up. At this point you’re looking at an index fund that’s going up 10-20% per year. “You know what? That’s not bad. At least I don’t have to deal with the stress.”

Wall Street wins, even though you were right. Your gem was a great company, you just weren’t patient enough.

Wall Street thinks in terms of years, but most investors think in terms of weeks, or even days. Regular people set their stop loss 5% below their purchase price. They get notifications when their stock drops. They get emails. Text messages. Hundreds of annoying little reminders that they’re dumb and they should sell.

Long term investors think differently. They might go weeks or months without checking in on their stocks. They’re confident in their decisions, and they don’t need the money any time soon. They can afford to wait out the stock manipulation.

While Wall Street has mastered the ability to manipulate a stock in the short term (less than a few years) they are unable to manipulate a stock in the long term.

This is because it would become too obvious. Imagine if Apple kept dropping every time they beat earnings. Eventually you’d get riots. The CEOs of banks and hedge funds would be dragged in front of congress. Regulation would be implemented to prevent this manipulation, and Wall Street’s gravy train would screech to a halt.

Eventually, good companies go up. You just have to wait it out.

In a previous article, I wrote about 10 ways to spot if your stock is being manipulated.

But let’s explore the “always red” concept a bit more.

There are three time periods a stock can be in the red. Pre-market, regular trading hours, and after-hours. The more often a stock is red, the more demoralizing it is to investors.

Pre-market and after-hours are easy for Wall Street to manipulate.

Google this: your_stock_ticker + premarket

Check out the page from Nasdaq.com. There you can see a company’s individual trades. Like this one.

Pre-market and after-hours trading is very thin. There’s almost zero volume compared to regular hours.

The spread between the bid and the ask is much larger. This means if a stock closes at $10, then the bid might be $9.80, and the ask could be $10.00.

Wall Street doesn’t usually pay fees to buy or sell stocks. You should assume they have unlimited resources when it comes to pre-market and after-hours trading. They can buy or sell as many shares as they want to accomplish their goals.

But it turns out they hardly need any money at all. A lot of trading activity during extended hours is 1 share trades. If your stock closed at $10, then Wall Street only needs to sell 1 share at market to drop the after-hours price to $9.80, a drop of 2%.

Seeing this drop, an ordinary person who wants out after hours might lower their asking price to $9.99. Say they want to get rid of 500 shares.

Wall Street then lowers their bid to $9.79. (Most of this is done by computer algorithms.)

Even if another ordinary person buys those 500 shares for $9.99, Wall Street can always sell another share at market, and lower the display price to $9.79. (At the same time, Wall Street will put their own shares for sale at $9.99, creating a ceiling.)

(These are the last few trades for Gilead Sciences on February 18th, 2021. Notice how the vast majority of shares trade at $65.23. It only takes 6 shares to drop the price to $64.91. This allows them to display an after-hours print of -0.49% on Yahoo Finance.)

Try to think of it like this: The display price pre-market or after-hours isn’t usually indicative of anything. It’s just the price Wall Street wants you to see. (Unless there’s breaking news.)

Ordinary investors have the numbers, but Wall Street has the money. In the war of stock manipulation, dollars are soldiers.

That covers the pre-market and the after-market, but what about regular hours?

How does Wall Street keep a stock perpetually in the red?

They do this by smashing a stock several percent at the open. Usually 1-2% for blue chips, or as much as 5-7% for growth stocks. Midafternoon they’ll let the stock recover a bit. Maybe the entire amount. It goes black, maybe even a little green.

But the next day, they crush it again.

It’s psychological manipulation. Your brain doesn’t see the stock as closing flat. It remembers the worst part of the day. That gut-wrenching feeling in your stomach when the stock was down 7%.

It forms this type of pattern, on a daily, weekly, and sometimes monthly basis.

Drop, recover. Drop, recover. Drop, recover…

15 minutes later…

Like in the movie Inception, Wall Street is trying to plant an idea in your head: “I am a bad investor. I should stick to index funds.”

How to beat Wall Street:

You buy. And you hold. You hold forever. You never, ever sell until your thesis plays out. If the stock drops, you should be thrilled. You can buy more at a cheaper price. You should laugh like an invincible warrior facing down an army.

“You want this stock? You want MY STOCK? Then you’re gonna have to kill me and dig up the cemetery because I am taking this stock to the grave.”

If you hold on to your shares, Wall Street can never own them.

This will frustrate them. If enough investors buy and hold a stock because it’s a great company with great growth prospects, then the vampire squid will move on.

Wall Street’s biggest weapon is fear. Fear in the face of an uncertain future.

If you sell, they win.

If you hold, you win.

Don’t let Wall Street steal your gems.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for additional in-depth analysis!