Whenever someone talks about finance, get ready for a bunch of big words and complicated topics. That what this article is full of! I'll try and refrain from using these complicated articles in the future (unless you want more of them!). Let me know what you think and how you did at: theslowenglishpodcast@gmail.com

VOCAB WORDS:
- investment
- spigot (pronounced like "spi-get")
- brokerage
- trading
- period

TRANSCRIPT:
The lure of snapping up stocks at bargain prices has been too strong to pass up for many people, even as uncertainty over the coronavirus pandemic clouds the market and global economic outlook.

Stuck at home, but armed with online trading apps, individual investors helped drive the historic comeback for stocks since late March, despite a backdrop of historic job losses, forecasts of sinking corporate profits and a global recession due to the economic fallout from the outbreak.

The market’s rally, which accelerated in April as the Federal Reserve and Congress opened an unprecedented spigot of financial aid to prop up the economy and ensure trading on Wall Street didn’t skip a beat, has pushed up the S&P 500 about 26% higher following a 34% plunge from February into late March.

Many professional investors remain wary about the sustainability of the market’s recent gains, however, given that the outlook for corporate earnings growth, a key driver of stock prices, remains uncertain at best as long as the outbreak continues to undermine efforts to reopen the economy. For many regular investors, those concerns have apparently taken a back seat to the temptation to take advantage of recent price drops to load up on stocks.

“In the last 10 years, this market’s had a pretty substantial bull run,” said Steven Quirk, executive vice president of Trading & Education at TD Ameritrade. “If you had bought the dips even when we’ve seen a correction, you’d have been rewarded.”

Several of the biggest online investment brokerages have seen a record surge this year in accounts opened by individual investors, sometimes referred to as retail investors in the industry, and a record volume of trades.

All told, some 608,000 new retail trading accounts opened in the first three months of the year at TD Ameritrade, a high-water mark for the company. That represents a more than three-fold increase from the same quarter last year.

“The biggest month we had for account openings in the quarter was March, when all of this was unfolding,” Quirk said.

ETrade Financial added 329,000 new individual investor accounts in the same period. That quarterly total eclipsed the company's previous annual high of 204,000 accounts opened in 2018. The online brokerage’s trading activity also marked a new high during the quarter.

“We pretty much shattered any record that we had in the firm,” said Chris Larkin, ETrade’s managing director of Trading and Investing Product.

CREDITS:
Article: Buying the Plunge: Individual Investors Remain Optimistic
Author: Associated Press
Publisher: U.S. News & World Report
Link: https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2020-05-14/buying-the-plunge-individual-investors-remain-optimistic