Dow 30 Stock Quotes

papers that the market was down to new lows, and the experts were predicting that it was sure to drop another 200 points in the Dow, then the farmer would look through the Standard & Poor’s Stock Guide and select around 30 stocks that had fallen in price substantially.

he Dow Jones Industrial Average is the sum of the largest 30 corporations, although they represent the bulk of the trading on that exchange. This average dominates everybody’s thinking about the market being up or down or whatever. Try to make individual stock picks and forget about the market. A good market could pull your stock up and, a bad one could pull it down, but the real investment factor is how well the company is managed and performs within the stock market.

Two lists of potentially attractive stocks for covered writing are the 30 stocks making up the Dow Jones industrial average and the stocks in the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats index mentioned in Chapter 4.

detect a market top, keep a close eye on the daily S&P 500, NYSE Composite, Dow 30, and Nasdaq Composite as they work their way higher. On one of the days in the uptrend, volume for the market as a whole will increase from the day before, but the index itself will show stalling action (a significantly smaller price increase for the day compared with the prior day’s much larger price increase). I call this “heavy volume without further price progress up.” The average doesn’t have to close down for the day, but in most instances it will, making the distribution (selling) much easier to see, as professional investors liquidate stock. The spread from the average’s daily high to its daily low may in some cases be a little wider than on previous days.

In Tsai's go‐go years, high‐flying stocks with​ positive momentum were all the rage. Polaroid, Xerox, IBM all traded at price‐to‐earnings ratios of more than 50. These expensive stocks were supported by explosively high growth rates. From 1964 to 1968, IBM, Polaroid, and Xerox grew their earnings per share at 88%, 22%, and 171%, respectively. Others like University Computing, Mohawk Data, and Fairchild Camera traded at several‐hundred times their trailing 12‐month earnings. The latter three and many others like them would go on to lose more than 80% in the 1969–1970 bear market. The Manhattan Fund was up almost 40% in 1967, more than double the Dow. But in 1968, he was down 7% and was ranked 299th out of 305 funds tracked by Arthur Lipper.16 When the market crash came, the people responsible were entirely unprepared. By 1969, half of the salesmen on Wall Street had only come into the business since 196217 and had seen nothing but a rising market. And when stocks turned, the highfliers that went up the fastest also came down the fastest. For example, National Student Marketing, which Tsai bought 122,000 shares for $5 million, crashed from $143 in December 1969 to $3.50 in July 1970.18 Between September and November 1929, $30 billion worth of stock value vanished; in the1969‐1970 crash, the loss was $300 billion!19 The gunslingers of the 1960s were thinking only about return and paid little attention to risk. This carefree attitude was a result of the market they were playing in. From 1950 through the end of 1965, the Dow was within 5% of its highs 66% of the time, and within 10% of its highs 87% of the time. There was virtually no turbulence at all. From 1950 to 1965, the only bear market was “The Kennedy Slide,” which chopped 27% off the S&P 500, and recovered in just over a year.