Monday my watch would not leave me alone.
I've had the Apple Watch since June, mostly because I got tired of pretending I didn't want one, and for two months it's been fine. Mostly it buzzes for texts and the occasional calendar reminder I already knew about. Monday it turned into a tiny angry drum against my wrist every twenty minutes because I'd set up price alerts on a couple of stocks back in July and completely forgotten about it.
If you weren't near a screen Monday morning: the Dow opened down over a thousand points. A thousand. It clawed back some of that by the close and finished off about 588, which apparently counts as a good outcome given how the morning looked, but for the first twenty minutes of trading half of Wall Street looked like it was having a collective panic attack. A lot of it traces back to China, the Shanghai index had already dropped more than 8% overnight, on top of the yuan getting devalued a couple weeks earlier, and that fear just rolled west with the sunrise. Circuit breakers were tripping on individual stocks left and right because nobody could figure out what anything was actually worth for a few minutes there.
I found out about all of this from my wrist before I found out about it from my phone, which is a genuinely strange way to receive financial news. There's something almost comic about a $350 aluminum rectangle tapping you gently like it's trying to wake you up gradually instead of just screaming. My actual reaction, standing in my kitchen holding a bowl of cereal, was to just say "okay" out loud to no one and keep eating. I didn't sell anything. I didn't check my 401k. I've decided, mostly out of laziness dressed up as wisdom, that I'm not smart enough to time a market and I shouldn't try, and Monday was a pretty good test of whether I actually believe that or just say I do. Turns out I mostly believe it. I did open the Schwab app once around 10am out of morbid curiosity and it was slow to load, which I choose to interpret as everyone else in America doing the exact opposite of what I was doing.
By Tuesday it was down again. And now here I am writing this on Wednesday and the Dow just had one of its best days in years, up something like 600 points, so if you're reading this expecting some grand takeaway about the market, I don't have one, because the market itself doesn't seem to have one either. It went down a lot, then down a little more, then back up a lot, inside of three days. I'm fairly sure nobody actually knows why with any precision beyond "China" and "everyone got scared at the same time," and I say that as someone who reads way too much financial news for a person who owns three index funds and a single individual stock he's mildly embarrassed about.
Unrelated but stuck in my head the same week: my desktop still won't stop nagging me to reserve my free Windows 10 upgrade. There's a little white flag icon sitting in my system tray that's been there since basically the day the OS launched back in July, and clicking it doesn't make it go away, it just makes it more insistent, like a kid tugging your sleeve. I actually do want to upgrade eventually, from what friends who've made the jump are saying, Edge is faster than Internet Explorer ever was and the Start menu is actually usable again, unlike That Other Version We Don't Talk About, but I want to do it on a weekend when I have time to deal with driver weirdness, not on a random Tuesday because a tray icon guilted me into it. Microsoft giving this away free for a year is honestly a smart move on their part. The delivery mechanism is just a little much.
Anyway. Watch's been quiet since Tuesday afternoon, which either means the market settled down or I finally remembered to turn the alerts off. Knowing me it's probably the second one.