Nothing lasts forever. But with America’s stock market on a prolonged bull run, its tech companies soaring to new heights, and world markets sloughing off Trump tweets, it was starting to feel like the good times would continue to roll. Things changed in the last few months of 2018 when it became clear that the year’s market results would leave no refuge for investors: “even safe funds fell in 2018.” The reality of the downward trend became even more stark as Apple shook the market to its core, peeling back the curtain on its first earnings warning since 2002 (sorry, my stock portfolio has taken such a bad hit, the puns are all I have left — they’re my portfolio in the storm). And like many of the economic and political stories you’ll be reading in the year to come, this one is, in part, about the relationship between the US and China. Alexis Madrigal sums up Five Ways to Look at Apple’s Surprise Bad News (none of them good).

+ “A lot of data in the past few days, including U.S. factory activity is pointing to a global economic slowdown.” Reuters: Wall Street tumbles on weak factory data, Apple warning.