CCPortals

I don’t seem to get it why these dow jones investor feel "optimistic". The common man is falling apart and buried in debt to his eyeballs. There are no jobs anywhere. If you lose a job this time or are looking for it, there is going to be a very tough time getting one.

But Bernanke say "recession ending. Economy taking V shape (whatever crap that means)" etc etc

And by the way what does Bernanke means when he says economy taking V shape?

It’s called a "suckers market".
The same maggots that drug the Dow into the toilet are building it back up in order to entice investors back in. And it’s working. The Dow will surpass 10,000 and the maggots will sell off, take their enormous profits and in October the Dow will fall below 5000. I guarantee it.

Why is the dow jones Industrial Average going up (gradually), when so many people are still unemployed, home sales are still lagging, businesses are still going under? Is it just the buying and selling by stock brokers and investors that is driving the market, and this has no real connection to the real economy and real peoples’ economic plight?

There is a deep disconnect between the stock market and the state of the economy. Don’t fall for the cheap gains in the market. It should go back down.

I don’t understand how the dow jones number is calculated, whither this number is 11,000 or 10,000. How is calculated? Where does is come from?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is the most familiar stock market number that is reported. It is an average based on 30 industrial companies. The companies change from time to time. They add up the share price of these 30 companies and multiply by a factor that accounts for stock splits and changes in the selection of the companies over time.

Other averages use other methods. The Standard & Poors 500 (S&P 500) takes the 500 largest companies. S&P uses some method to choose how many shares of each company. The stock price of each is multiplied by the number of shares of each and the result is added up.

I thought Dow Jones was just the name of the market companies can sell their stock. And if the Dow Jones is calculating its own price per share, then who knows if they are inflating their own numbers?

dow jones owns The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barrons Magazine, and a few community newspapers.

Dow Jones is a publicly traded company but privately controlled. Dow Jones is actually owned by News Corporation.

Go here for more information…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Jones

What was the original formula to calculate the dow jones Industrials Average? What is the current formula? My agenda is to calculate the Dow Jones Industrials Average using the original formula to show why "buy and hold" investing is a terrible idea.

The original formula was to add up the price of one share of each stock and divide by the number of stocks in the index. Originally there were 11 stocks. Now the Dow uses a divisor to account for stock splits and dividends. The current divisor is 0.132319125. A better way to assess the overall market is probably the S&P 500. Its a market capitalization weighted average.