Panic Buying

Categories: Trading

Step into the Wayback Machine and go to early 1998. The heat of the First Internet Bubble is hot. The only way you got hurt in the stock market was to be holding cash and not long, very long, very exposed to the market. Risk on, wax off.

FOMO was huge, and the fear of missing out on the next hot Netscape, Yahoo, eBay, AOL in their heydays was palpable. So when a new issue came, in a panic, buyers would buy "at any price" for fear that, if they didn't, they'd be somehow left out.

And the term is a Thing because panic selling is a common entity; a company that was supposed to earn $3 announces a loss of 50 cents and the stock craters from $100 to $39 fast.

Panic selling is a pretty easy-to-understand phenomenon. Happens often. But panic buying? Yeah, that's a new-ish Thing.



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