The market philosophy and the overpowering strategy on how to approach the markets since last summer – and I mean the stock market, the housing market, the crypto market, the junk-bond market, and a bunch of others – was summarized eloquently for all eternity: “Just shut up and buy,” the guy said.

For a long time, I mean for months, this strategy worked, everything was going completely crazy, and people kept changing metrics to explain that this was the new normal, that this is how it would be from now on. It became a “raging mania” – again one of those highly accurate technical terms – and it practically didn’t matter what you bought, and at what ludicrous insane price you bought, because as long as you bought, you made money.

But then, the logic of “just shut up and buy” broke somewhere near February 12. Many of the most hyped segments of the whole rigamarole started cratering. We’re talking IPO stocks such as Airbnb, which is down 39% from the peak, Zoom, which is down 46% from the peak, Palantir which is down 53%, Snowflake which is down 45%, and many others…

EV stocks started cratering too, including Tesla which is down 35% from the peak, and SPACs – the special purchase acquisition companies – and especially the EV SPACs that are down 50% and 60% and some over 70%, such as Quantumscape, and a few are down over 80%, such as super-hype-nova Nikola, which is down 87%…

Or media-darling Cathy Wood’s ARK Innovation Fund which is down, well, only 34%…

And real estate outfits such as Compass, which had its IPO seven weeks ago, is down 37% from the peak on the first trading day, and Redfin which is down 47%. And Zillow, which is now flipping houses, is down 45%.

And there’s another market philosophy and overpowering strategy on how to approach the markets: “Just buy the effing dip.”

In these segments, people did just that, and they bought the effing dip, or rather every plunge that the standouts such as Nikola performed, and every time they bought the effing dip, shortly thereafter they got run over by another and even bigger effing dip. At some point, this is starting to hurt.

In other words, there is a bloodbath going on in these segments. And this bloodbath has been deepening and widening, and their market capitalization is in the billions of dollars, or hundreds of billions, such as Tesla, and the damage has started to bubble to the surface ever so gently even in the overall stock market indices though they track many trillions of dollars in stocks.

The Nasdaq is down only about 5% from its high, and the S&P 500 has stalled since mid-April and on Friday was down just 2% from the high. So people who are invested in the overall stock market have not felt the pain. But others that chased after the biggest super-hype-novas of the moment are getting crushed one stock at a time.

That’s how broader problems in the stock market start out.

Then there is the entire crypto space. There are now well over 5,000 cryptos. There are more cryptos than stocks. Everyone is popping them out, and there are new ones every day. I might make my own crypto too pretty soon just to properly mock the whole thing.

Well, that whole thing was once worth over $2.5 trillion, $2.5 trillion being nothing to mock, even today when we’re throwing the trillions around like there’s no tomorrow.

And at the moment, meaning less than two weeks later, that whole thing is worth about $1.2 trillion less. In other words, in less than two weeks, in just the crypto space, $1.2 trillion in imagined wealth evaporated into ambient air.

For some of these folks who traffic in these digital entities, the hated fiat dollar is going to blow up and disappear, and these thousands of cryptos are going to be around, and take the dollar’s place.

Bitcoin is currently at $32,000. It’s down 50% from the high a few weeks ago. That by itself wiped out $600 billion in wealth that folks thought they had and suddenly don’t have, poof, just gone.

By now, everyone knows that these cryptos are essentially useless for transactions in every-day commerce because they’re too cumbersome and expensive to buy stuff with, or transfer fiat money with, even internationally. There are much quicker and simpler and cheaper ways of doing it. And then there are the cryptos’ hair-raising ups and downs that make transactions super risky. And folks have now given up hailing them as the next payment system.

Instead the meme is now that they’re a “store of value” and a “hedge against inflation.”

So one heck of a store of value, has now lost 40% or 50% or 60% of its value in a few weeks. And one heck of a way of hedging against 5% or 6% or even 10% inflation by right off the bat losing 50% in a few weeks. That’s a huge plunge in purchasing power in just a few weeks. Something close to “crypto hyperinflation.”

“Just shut up and buy” works wonderfully until suddenly it doesn’t.