What about the stock market?

When headlines make it sound like a financial HURRICANE is brewing, it's a great day to learn about the stock market. There's nothing like getting involved to help you learn.  If you just happen to be reading about stocks on a really, really bad day, there's going to be a lot of information to hear, a lot of opinions of "how this happened."  If you stick with it you WILL start building your own perspective.

Just starting out?  Let's GO TO the Dow Jones Average graph.  Select  "5y" to set the graph, and put today's news into perspective. Look at ups and downs over a 5-year period.    You can see that over the last five years there's been lots of jiggling up and down, and what happened in late 2008/early2009 made a much bigger jiggle.

Pay  attention to what's in the news about different industries and the world. Oil stocks made a difference in the Dow Jones average on August 4, 2011.  Oil "spiked" in February, but on the fourth it had fallen.  I, personally, welcomed lower oil prices!

If you don't feel sure about your answer, don't worry.  Nobody's ever sure about the stock market, but you WILL get a sense of what matters. How do you do that?  By watching the chart and reading the news. You don't have to stay glued to the chart; you can adjust the chart to see weeks, months, or years of stock market activity.

Spoiler warning:  you will find there's lots of this little squiggling up and down with little impact.  You might want to look at the chart, read some in-depth articles, watching how the stock market activity get's reported.  We hear, "AhhH, The market is upppP! or Ohhhh, the market's DOWnnnn."  I'll bet you're getting an idea of what a 100-point drop in the Dow Jones Average might mean.

The markets aren't mysterious. Just take a direct look. It's  what I did  and it's  what I trust you, too, can learn from.  Learn about the periodic ups-and-downs called "the business cycle."  Have you noticed that every 5 or 10 years or so everything is booming, followed by a slow down and then another boom?

The graph is a reflection of history!  Choose a time-period to see how the charts looked at a time in history.  5 years (5y) can give you a perspective.   I like to go far back, so I hit "max," click and hold the mouse, and pull the chart back to the 1920s, before the Depression. You don't have to go that far back. See can see peaks and craters in business cycles since 1970. The US quit backing the dollar with gold. The Vietnam war tapered off.  Oil was still booming into the 80s.  Then came the internet.  The Berlin Wall fell. Much is written about what these events meant to the value of the dollar. It's interesting to see how world events, economics and politics interplay, how one affects the other. 

If you are just getting started, it won't take long before you've got an opinion about the experts.

 About looking up and learning new terms. Everybody has they're own set of knowledge.  What one person knows the next person better look up.   I have fun with this. My preferred method is going to Google and typing in "define," say, "average."  Define Dow Jones.  Define Bonanza.  Define gusher.   Define stock market crash.  Define Black Tuesday.  This is what you get for "Black Tuesday": October 29th, 1929. This is the date of the most famous stock market crash in history.

 Define Paul Krugman? I read his twitter.  Which brings up something important. What's important to you doesn't have to be important to anybody else.  Who knows what mysteries belong to you.  Who knows what inner light will lead you. Whatever you do with this, I DO KNOW you can have a wonderful time.  Please come back and tell me about your experience!