I'm honestly puzzled by how this works. Most people must be in the market for a completely different reason than I am.

Somebody farts out of tune, and everybody sells stocks. Two days later, everybody buys them again for some other idiotic reason.

At what point did people decide that because interest rates went up last week, or the price of oil went up a buck, that Microsoft is going to be worthless in ten years? What kind of perspective is involved here? If these are institutional investors, aren't any of them in it for the long haul?

I'm no expert, and most of my stuff is in mutual funds, but geez. Is it that most trading is being done automatically by computers now?