Just when you think you can breathe, you get a tweet in the early morning that turns the market from green to red in no time.
When you focus on minding your risk as a default, these abrupt events don’t really factor in—except maybe as a chance to take some profit or consider tail-event insurance, or both. Still, it does raise your curiosity when you see a sharp drop on the chart and wonder what caused it.
If you resort to the usual news sources, you’re not going to know right away—there’s always a delay between the move and the headlines.
So I tapped the chat icon on Thinkorswim mobile, remembering there’s a squawkbox-style news feed as part of Thinkorswim, both on desktop and mobile. Sure enough, I scrolled to the time the tweet was posted—7:45 AM on May 23, 2025—and that just so happened to mark the beginning of the precipitous drop.
Just a reminder of the resources we have as individual risk managers. Does it make a practical difference? For me, no—I was already positioned appropriately for current conditions. But it’s still nice to be able to know almost immediately, if not immediately.
The S&P eventually recouped most of that ~1.7% drop, so I’m not sure how concerned the market really is.