Dow Stock Quotes

Nearly every time I strayed from the herd, I've made a lot of money. Wandering away from the action is the way to find the new action.

stock market as measured by the Dow did decrease 25% between 1969 and 1971

By the fall of 1929, Livermore built up his biggest short position ever, $450 million spread across 100 stocks. And he was about to receive the biggest payday of his entire life. From October 25 through November 13, the Dow crashed 32%. In those 11 days, the Dow fell 5% seven times. Livermore covered all of his shorts and was worth $100 million, equivalent to $1.4 billion in today's dollars. He was one of the richest people in the world. This would be the height of his powers.

Stock-exchange traders are also in danger. Most financial trading today is already being managed by computer algorithms that can process in a second more data than a human can in a year, and can react to the data much faster than a human can blink. On 23 April 2013, Syrian hackers broke into Associated Press’s official Twitter account. At 13:07 they tweeted that the White House had been attacked and President Obama was hurt. Trade algorithms that constantly monitor newsfeeds reacted in no time and began selling stocks like mad. The Dow Jones went into free fall and within sixty seconds lost 150 points, equivalent to a loss of $136 billion! At 13:10 Associated Press clarified that the tweet was a hoax. The algorithms reversed gear and by 13:13 the Dow Jones had recuperated almost all the losses.

The first concerns how an investor should choose among different types of broad-based index funds. The best-known of the broad stock market mutual funds and ETFs in the United States track the S&P 500 index of the largest stocks. We prefer using a broader index that includes more smaller-company stocks, such as the Russell 3000 index or the Dow-Wilshire 5000 index. Funds that track these broader indexes are often referred to as “total stock market” index funds. More than 80 years of stock market history confirm that portfolios of smaller stocks have produced a higher rate of return than the return of the S&P 500 large-company index. While smaller companies are undoubtedly less stable and riskier than large firms, they are likely—on average—to produce somewhat higher future returns. Total stock market index funds are the better way for investors to benefit from the long-run growth of economic activity.

In 1993, the year Clinton became President, median household income in the United States was $48,884. Six years later, it was $56,080, and the federal government ran a $125.6-billion surplus. There was an even bigger surplus in 2000, and ever since 2001 the federal government has been in the red. In 2013, median household income was $51,939, and the budget deficit was $680 billion (which was small by post-Clinton standards). The stock market began the nineteen-nineties with the Dow at 2,753. At the end of trading in 1999, the Dow was at 11,497.

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.

Sure enough, America was shocked by Babson's words: "More people are borrowing and speculating today than ever in our history. Sooner or later a crash is coming which will take in the leading stocks and cause a decline of from 60 to 80 points in the Dow Jones barometer. Wise are those investors who get out of debt and reef their sails.

In response to current events, people often reach for historical analogies, and this occasion was no exception. The trick is to choose the right analogy. In August 2007, the analogies that came to mind—both inside and outside the Fed—were October 1987, when the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted nearly 23 percent in a single day, and August 1998, when the Dow had fallen 11.5 percent over three days after Russia defaulted on its foreign debts. With help from the Fed, markets had rebounded each time with little evident damage to the economy. Not everyone viewed these interventions as successful, though. In fact, some viewed the Fed’s actions in the fall of 1998—three quarter-point reductions in the federal funds rate—as an overreaction that helped fuel the growing dot-com bubble. Others derided what they perceived to be a tendency of the Fed to respond too strongly to price declines in stocks and other financial assets, which they dubbed the “Greenspan put.” (A put is an options contract that protects the buyer against loss if the price of a stock or other security declines.) Newspaper opinion columns in August 2007 were rife with speculation that Helicopter Ben would provide a similar put soon. In arguing against Fed intervention, many commentators asserted that investors had grown complacent and needed to be taught a lesson. The cure to the current mess, this line of thinking went, was a repricing of risk, meaning a painful reduction in asset prices—from stocks to bonds to mortgage-linked securities. “Credit panics are never pretty, but their virtue is that they restore some fear and humility to the marketplace,” the Wall Street Journal had editorialized, in arguing for no rate cut at the August 7 FOMC meeting.

Only four companies—Proctor & Gamble, General Electric, AT&T, and DuPont—have survived on the Dow Jones index of the top-thirty U.S. industrial stocks since the 1960s.

So many people were basing decisions on Granville’s forecasts in the early 1980s that when he said something was going to happen, it happened because they believed it would. That is, when he said the market would go down, the prediction scared buyers out of the market – and lo, it went down. This happened early in 1981, when Granville told his disciples to sell everything. The day after this famous warning was issued, the stock market fell out of bed – 23 points on the Dow. All of Wall Street said ooh and ah. What a powerful prophet was this Granville! The plunge was brief but impressive while it lasted.

I have never known a great trader, with his first reputation established as a bear operator, who did not either turn bull or drop out of the market altogether.

Take the five stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with the lowest stock prices and highest dividend yields. Discard the one with the lowest price. Put 40% of your money in the stock with the second-lowest price. Put 20% in each of the three remaining stocks. One year later, sort the Dow the same way and reset the portfolio according to steps 1 through 4. Repeat until wealthy. Over

¿Cómo podríamos definir el concepto de pool? Dow (Nelson, 1902) dijo que un pool es, básicamente, un profesional o grupo de profesionales que, tras valorar que una acción está demasiado barata (en principio, sus métodos de valoración no son relevantes para nosotros), deciden, de forma más o menos coordinada, empezar a comprar acciones de dicha compañía. Al mismo tiempo merodean otros profesionales, que al conocer sus técnicas de actuación se unen a ese interés comprador, intensificando así el grado de manipulación sobre el precio del activo. El inversor amateur, víctima del pánico que acompaña a los mercados bajistas, y alentado por las malas noticias de los medios de comunicación, se ve impulsado a vender sus activos, con lo que se convierte, sin ser consciente de ello, en la contrapartida del pool profesional, que es quien adquiere poco a poco todos los activos, en una fase que denominada “de acumulación”. Cuando el interés vendedor ha remitido, todo el stock está en poder del pool. Sin presión vendedora, el precio no puede hacer otra cosa nada más que subir, lo que le proporciona al profesional sus primeros beneficios. Pasado un tiempo, cuando el miedo se empieza a diluir y el gran público vuelve a interesarse por la inversión en Bolsa, viene la fase “de participación”. Los inversores mejor informados, que son capaces de detectar la acción profesional de forma prematura, aún podrán sacar algo de tajada de las subidas de los precios; el resto, la gran masa de inversores desinformados, entrarán al juego demasiado tarde. Entonces será el mismo profesional que compró en los mínimos quien le transmita sus propios títulos al amateur, en un proceso que denominamos “de distribución” y que culminará, tarde o temprano, en un desplome de las cotizaciones, justo en el preciso momento en que el interés comprador haya desaparecido por completo. Esto dejará encerrados a todos aquellos operadores que entraron en la cima con la esperanza de que la fiesta alcista no tendría final.

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.

Some great investments are not bought on the open market or Big Board. They are grown economically by entrepreneurs in exceedingly small towns. An investment in the neighborhood or family is an asset to all involved.

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.

The selection of common stocks for the portfolio of the defensive investor should be a relatively simple matter. Here we would suggest four rules to be followed: 1. There should be adequate though not excessive diversification. This might mean a minimum of ten different issues and a maximum of about thirty.† 2. Each company selected should be large, prominent, and conservatively financed. Indefinite as these adjectives must be, their general sense is clear. Observations on this point are added at the end of the chapter. 3. Each company should have a long record of continuous dividend payments. (All the issues in the Dow Jones Industrial Average met this dividend requirement in 1971.) To be specific on this point we would suggest the requirement of continuous dividend payments beginning at least in 1950.* 4. The investor should impose some limit on the price he will pay for an issue in relation to its average earnings over, say, the past seven years. We suggest that this limit be set at 25 times such average earnings, and not more than 20 times those of the last twelve-month period. But such a restriction would eliminate nearly all the strongest and most popular companies from the portfolio. In particular, it would ban virtually the entire category of “growth stocks,” which have for some years past been the favorites

Take the five stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with the lowest stock prices and highest dividend yields. Discard the one with the lowest price. Put 40% of your money in the stock with the second-lowest price. Put 20% in each of the three remaining stocks. One year later, sort the Dow the same way and reset the portfolio according to steps 1 through 4. Repeat until wealthy.

The year 1929 is famous as the Titanic of financial disasters. Yet this Titanic didn't sink. The Dow was up for the first nine months that year, fell 39 percent in October-November, then staged a rally and rose in December. If you held stocks from the beginning of 1929 to the end, you made money. The real Titanic year was 1931, when the Dow lost 53 percent - the bulk of which disappeared in a single month, Black September. Nobody talks about the Crash of '31, though it ranks first in the list of obnoxious periods for U.S. stockholders. Nobody talks about Black September. Everybody talks about the Crash of '29, which comes to mind whenever the bear word is spoken.

Many have been supposedly foolproof but zany formulae that have made no one rich but the hucksters who sold them to the gullible. But over the years there have been some approaches that have enjoyed at least a modicum of success. These range from the Dow Theory first espoused by Wall Street Journal founder Charles Dow—essentially using technical indicators to try to identify and profit from different market phases—and David Butler’s CANSLIM system, to the value investing school articulated by Benjamin Graham. The earth-shattering suggestion of the research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s was that the code might actually be unbreakable, and efforts to decipher it were expensive and futile. Harry Markowitz’s modern portfolio theory and William Sharpe’s CAPM indicated that the market itself was the optimal balance between risks and return, while Gene Fama presented a cohesive, compelling argument for why that was: The net effect of the efforts of thousands upon thousands of investors continually trying to outsmart each other was that the stock market was efficient, and in practice hard to beat. Most investors should therefore just sit on their hands and buy the entire market. But in the 1980s and 1990s, a new round of groundbreaking research—some of it from the same efficient-markets disciples who had rattled the investing world in the 1960s and 1970s—started revealing some fault lines in the academic edifice built up in the previous decades. Perhaps the stock market wasn’t entirely efficient, and maybe there were indeed ways to beat it in the long run? Some gremlins in the system were always known, but often glossed over. Already in the early 1970s, Black and Scholes had noted that there were some odd issues with the theory, such as how less volatile stocks actually produced better long-term returns than choppier ones. That contradicted the belief that return and risk (using volatility as a proxy for risk) were correlated. In other words, loopier roller coasters produce greater thrills. Though the theory made intuitive sense, in practice it didn’t seem to hold up to rigorous scrutiny. This is why Scholes and Black initially proposed that Wells Fargo should set up a fund that would buy lower-volatility stocks (that is, low-beta) and use leverage to bring the portfolio’s overall volatility up to the broader stock market.7 Hey, presto, a roller coaster with the same number of loops as everyone else, but with even greater thrills. Nonetheless, the efficient-markets hypothesis quickly became dogma at business schools around the United States.

THE POWER OF MSCI, FTSE RUSSELL, and S&P Dow Jones Indices is largely over only stock markets. Of even greater and direct importance to countries are their presence and weighting in various influential bond market indices. These may not have the cachet of the brand-name stock market benchmarks bandied about on TV bulletins, but indices like the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate or JPMorgan’s EMBI and GBI-EM are also powerful in their own way.

The data bears this out. In addition to a “persistence scorecard,” S&P Dow Jones Indices publishes snapshots of how many mutual funds beat their benchmarks. Most years, a majority underperform their indices, whatever the market. Over multiple years, the data becomes progressively grimmer. As of June 2020, only 15 percent of US stock-pickers had cumulatively managed to surpass their benchmark over the last decade. In bond markets, it is a similar tale, albeit varying depending on the flavor of fixed income. The data is more favorable for fund managers in more exotic, less efficient asset classes, such as emerging markets, but on the whole the data is clear that in the longer run most fund managers still underperform their passive rivals after fees.

the Motley Fool’s goofy ratio couldn’t possibly be causing stock prices to rise, the only sensible conclusion was that its predictive power was an illusion. The Foolish Four portfolio made investors feel like idiots when it lost 14% in the year 2000 alone. Meanwhile, after six years of underperforming the market by nearly two percentage points annually, the Harry Dent–inspired mutual fund shut down in mid-2005 with the Dow mired about 31,000 points below his forecast.

Systems fool us by presenting themselves—or we fool ourselves by seeing the world—as a series of events. The daily news tells of elections, battles, political agreements, disasters, stock market booms or busts. Much of our ordinary conversation is about specific happenings at specific times and places. A team wins. A river floods. The Dow Jones Industrial Average hits 10,000. Oil is discovered. A forest is cut. Events are the outputs, moment by moment, from the black box of the system.

With the first banks opened on Monday, the afternoon brought another request from Roosevelt. Stating that he needed the tax revenue, he asked Congress that beer with alcohol content of up to 3.2 percent be made legal; the Eighteenth Amendment did not specify the percentage that constituted an intoxicating beverage. Congress complied. The House passed the bill the very next day with a vote count of 316–97, pushing it to the Senate. Wednesday brought good cheer: The stock market opened for the first time in Roosevelt’s presidency. In a single-day record, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained over 15 percent—a gain in total market value of $3 billion. By Thursday, for increased fiscal prudence, the Senate had added an exemption for wine to go with beer, but negotiated the alcohol content down to 3.05 percent. Throughout the week, banks were receiving net deposits rather than facing panicked withdrawals. Over the following weeks, the administration developed a sweeping farm package designed to “increase purchasing power of our farmers” and “relieve the pressure of farm mortgages.” To guarantee the safety of bank deposits, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created. To regulate the entire American stock and bond markets, the Exchange Act of 1933 required companies to report their financial condition accurately to the buying public, establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission. Safety nets such as Social Security for retirement and home loan guarantees for individuals would be added to the government’s portfolio of responsibilities within a couple of years. It was the largest peacetime escalation of government in American history.

Large-cap U.S. Stock S&P 500 Index Midcap U.S. Stock S&P Midcap 400 Index Small-cap U.S. Value stock Russell 2000 Value Index Non-U.S. Developed stock MSCI EAFE Index Non-U.S. Emerging stock MSCI Emerging Markets Index Real Estate Dow Jones U.S. Select REIT Index Natural Resources Goldman Sachs Natural Resources Index Commodities Deutsche Bank Liquid Commodity Index U.S. Bonds Barclays Capital Aggregate Bond Index Inflation Protected Bonds Barclays Capital U.S. Treasury Inflation Note Index Non-U.S. Bonds Citibank WGBI Non-U.S. Dollar Index Cash 3-Month Treasury Bill

Many complex elements contributed to the Great Depression of 1929. However, most economists believe that the two main causes of the Depression were the immensely uneven distribution of wealth during the previous decade and the extensive speculation in stock that took place in the latter half of the decade. The decade preceding the Depression was a time of tremendous prosperity and became known as the “Roaring Twenties.” However, prosperity was not for everyone. The number of wealthy people in the country was less than a tenth of a percent of the total population yet they controlled most of the money in the country. In a well-functioning economy, demand must equal supply. But in 1929 wealth was so unevenly distributed that the supply of products far exceeded the demand for them. People may have wanted the products at the time but they couldn’t afford them. If supplies keep building and demand lessens, the economy can collapse. One way to balance the equation is to allow people to buy products over time. By the end of the Roaring Twenties, over 60 percent of all automobiles and 80 percent of all radios had been purchased on credit. With this new influx of money into the market, the economy was booming at the end of the 1920s. Stock speculation became rampant. Profits as high as 3,400 percent could be made in less than a year and people could buy on margin. In other words, they only had to put down 10 percent cash when buying a stock. Because of this, everyone was buying stocks. The poor were equal players with the rich. This buying spree pushed the market to new highs. In 1928 alone the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose from 191 to 300. There were warning signs as minor recessions occurred in the spring of 1929. Investors became nervous. In October people started selling their shares of stock. As the market started dropping, more and more people sold stock, margins were called, and by October 1929 there was panic selling. Stock prices dropped so fast that many rich people became poor in a matter of hours.

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.

One of the more useful things I learned as a midshipman at Maine Maritime Academy were the names of the seven masts of a seven masted schooner. When I mentioned to the 600 people in attendance at a Homecoming event that my degree was a BS in Marlinspike Seamanship no one laughed, leaving me in the embarrassing position of having to explain that actually I had a Bachelor of Marine Science degree. Later looking into a mirror I convinced myself that I really didn’t look old enough to have lived in an era when wooden ships were sailed by iron men. What I remembered was that we were wooden men sailing on iron ships that were actually made of steel, however I can remember schooners sailing along the coast of New England and I do remember the seven names of a seven masted schooner. In actual fact only one seven masted schooner was ever built and she was the she a 475 foot, steel hulled wind driven collier/tanker named the Thomas W. Lawson, named after a Boston millionaire, stock-broker, book author, and President of the Boston Bay State Gas Co. Launched in 1902 she held the distinction of being the largest pure sail ship ever built. Originally the names of the masts were the foremast, mainmast, mizzenmast, spanker, jigger, driver, and pusher. Later the spanker became the kicker and the spanker moved to next to last place, with the pusher becoming the after mast. Depending on whom you talked to, the names and their order drifted around and a lot of different naming systems were formed. Some systems used numbers and others the days of the week, however there are very few, if any of the iron men left to dispute what the masts were called. The Thomas W. Lawson had two steam winches and smaller electrically driven winches, to raise and lower her huge sails. The electricity was provided by a generator, driven by what was termed a donkey engine. On November 20, 1907 the large 475 foot schooner sailed for England. Experiencing stormy weather she passed inside of the Bishop Rock lighthouse and attempted to anchor. That night both anchor chains broke, causing the ship to smash against Shag Rock near Annet. The schooner, pounded by heavy seas capsized and sank. Of the 19 souls aboard Captain George W. Dow and the ships engineer Edward L. Rowe were the only survivors. Everyone else, including the pilot, drown and were buried in a mass grave in St Agnes cemetery.

The ruble’s fall, described by analysts as “staggering” and “extreme,” prompted Russia’s central bank to hike a key interest rate by 6.5 percentage points, to 17%, after New York’s trading day had ended. One dollar now buys more than 65 rubles, compared with 33 rubles at the start of the year. Before Russia’s late move, U.S. stocks posted their fifth loss in six sessions, with the Dow industrials dropping 99.99 points, or 0.6%, to 17180.84. The selling was more intense in other markets, with Europe’s main index down 2.2%. Stock markets from Thailand to Mexico also dropped.

As a result, proportional movements of high-priced stocks in the Dow averages have a much greater impact than movements of lower-priced stocks, regardless of the size of the company.

Chris Krueger, long-time Capitol Hill watcher for Guggenheim Securities, says the people expecting this kind of kumbaya moment are “Pollyannas”. He said: “My reading of the White House is that they already feel pretty good about their legacy, having done what no administration since Harry Truman has done and extended access to healthcare.” These are the facts on the ground, which bode ill for investors, but there is a conundrum: history suggests we are at a point in the political cycle when markets usually do well. After some volatility around the midterms, the stock market has historically settled into a very strong year in the third year of the presidential cycle, according to an analysis by Jeff Hirsch, editor of the Stock Trader’s Almanac. Sweeping in 180 years of data on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and predecessor indices, he calculates the average Year 3 gain to be 10.4 per cent, almost double the next best year, the presidential election year itself.

a declining Dow gives us our chance to shine and pile up the percentage advantages which, coupled with only an average performance during advancing markets, will give us quite satisfactory long-term results. Our target is an approximately ½% decline for each 1% decline in the Dow and if achieved, means we have a considerably more conservative vehicle for investment in stocks than practically any alternative.8 Buffett

I resurrect this “market-guessing” section only because after the Dow declined from 995 at the peak in February to about 865 in May, I received a few calls from partners suggesting that they thought stocks were going a lot lower. This always raises two questions in my mind: (1) if they knew in February that the Dow was going to 865 in May, why didn’t they let me in on it then; and, (2) if they didn’t know what was going to happen during the ensuing three months back in February, how do they know in May? There is also a voice or two after any hundred point or so decline suggesting we sell and wait until the future is clearer. Let me again suggest two points: (1) the future has never been clear to me (give us a call when the next few months are obvious to you—or, for that matter the next few hours); and, (2) no one ever seems to call after the market has gone up one hundred points to focus my attention on how unclear everything is, even though the view back in February doesn’t look so clear in retrospect. If

The [Dow-Alcoa and Alcoa-IG] negotiations [of 1929] reveal strikingly the technique of cartel diplomacy—the steady application of "pressure" and the resort alternatively to challenges and blandishments. The similarity to power politics in which trial by battle is a last resort is marked. The procedure discloses the vast gulf between big business in practice and the patterns of behavior assumed in a regime of free competition. It shows how the conference table superseded the market as the arena for decision making.

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.

We frequently hear “stocks typically return between eight and ten percent a year.” Well, over multiple decades, you could say they'll compound at between 8 and 10%, but the last time the Dow returned between 8 and 10% was 1952. There is a lot of space between what you expect the market to do and what it actually does, and this is where unforced errors lurk. Stocks tend to swing in a wide range, spending a lot of time at the fringe and little time near the average, delivering maximum frustration. This sort of erratic behavior transfers money from the amateur's pocket and into the professional's.

On Black Monday, October 19, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 508 points, or 22.6 percent, and the New York Stock Exchange lost $1 trillion in value. Many feared that Black Monday was a repeat of the stock market crash in 1929, which signaled the Great Depression of the 1930s. Nobody wanted history to repeat itself, and Congress did not want to be blamed for causing the collapse of financial markets. Support for antitakeover legislation, which was perceived as a contributing cause of Black Monday, disappeared.

However, the advantage of micro-cap stocks is their correlation to the larger-cap Dow—about .65, much lower than the entire small-cap universe. Furthermore, since 2008, the correlation has steadily been decreasing—the opposite of what is happening in the broader Russell 2000 Index.

Remember: Companies that pay dividends will always provide you with a return. Always. You don’t need to examine your stocks’ price movement each day or panic when you hear on the news that the Dow fell by 500 points. Instead, concentrate your attention on the power of compounding dividends over time and their ability to provide income on

Into this situation, came the Reagan Administration’s bizarre collection of “free market” economic conundrums, called by their advocates, “Supply-Side” economics. The idea was thin cover for unleashing some of the highest rates of short-term personal profiteering in history, at the expense of the greater good of the country’s long-term economic health. While policies imposed after October 1982 to collect billions from Third World countries, brought a huge windfall of financial liquidity to the American banking system, the ideology of Wall Street, and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan‘s zeal for lifting the government “shackles” off financial markets, resulted in the greatest extravaganza in world financial history. When the dust settled by the end of that decade, some began to realize that Reagan’s “free market” had destroyed an entire national economy. It happened to be the world’s largest economy, and the base of world monetary stability as well. On the simple-minded and quite mistaken argument that a mere removing of the tax burden on the individual or company would allow them to release “stifled creative energies” and other entrepreneurial talents, President Ronald Reagan signed the largest tax reduction bill in postwar history in August 1981. The bill contained provisions which also gave generous tax relief for certain speculative forms of real estate investment, especially commercial real estate. Government restrictions on corporate takeovers were also removed, and Washington gave the clear signal that “anything goes,” so long as it stimulated the Dow Jones Industrials stock index.