system
A chat on subreddit /r/wallstreetbets
human
Actually that is the conspiracy. That’s literally how the rich keep getting richer. As they are intricately tied to these large financial institutions for obvious reasons, they know to just hold every time there’s a downturn in the economy. The average Joe, with no formal financial education (since it is intentionally left out of the school curriculum) does what anyone encountering a frightening market with no knowledge of it and in his lower financial position would do: sell at a loss to ensure he has some money still at the end of the day. After this, the governments who often times create these crashes themselves through poor management, suddenly appear to “hear the voices of the citizens” and begin printing money to “relieve” the economy, thereby inflating the dollar on top of the economic recession. 

After all this, average Joe feels relieved because he has the same amount of dollars in his savings again, while not knowing that he forked over all his assets during the crash (assets are way more valuable than cash because of the mechanisms I just outlined), and that even though he has the same amount of dollars again they are worth far less. Average Joe then joins everyone else grumbling about the cost of basic commodities continuously rising. Cycle continues
gpt
IDK why people conflate wealthy people who are still morons just the same as us with institutional investors.  Rich people buy the top and sell the bottom just like us, the only difference is they are smart enough to not dump 10% of their networth into a speculative stock play - look at the equities portfolio of any rich person and you'll see dozens of small bets in companies like Snowflake - compared to a poor persons account and its just all in on one or 5 ish stocks.  At the end of the day the main difference between a rich mans portfolio and a poor mans is position sizing, for them 2% position is 100K for us that could be 25 dollars - and humans do a terrible job thinking in terms of percent and would only see the nominal dollar value.  

&amp;#x200B;

Institutional investors are the ones who tend to do well in moments like this because they have the quantitative rules/bylaws that restrict what/when they can buy.