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You're forgetting that the stock of more than one company is traded.

Can you explain how that impacts my mental model / questions? Are you pointing out that some companies may be barely affected by coronavirus and some a lot?

Yes, and also some companies may be affected more by their own fortunes, or the fortunes of their particular industry, than by the mood of a monolithic "market."

But it seems to be accepted wisdom nowadays that nobody can pick stocks and beat the average consistently.

So what a large chunk of the market ends up doing is buying index trackers or achieving the same goal by spreading investments as widely as possible.

The nice thing about indexes is there are so many of them...

I read somewhere there are actually more ETFs now than individual stocks.

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