So, How's the Market Doing?

When people ask, "How's the market doing?" the response is typically based on how the Dow Jones Industrial Average is doing (Dow for short). The Dow has been around since the late 1800s, so it has a long history of measuring how the US stock market has performed. Despite its popularity and longevity, the Dow has some quirks that make it not necessarily the best way to measure how the overall US stock market is performing. Recently, the powers that be decided to drop an iconic company that had been in the index off and on for more than 100 years. General Electric was one of the original companies in the index back in 1896 and has been continuously in the index since 1907. But not anymore. One of my core philosophies is that a successful investment strategy depends on viewing our economy through a very wide lens. And just as the Dow is bigger than GE, our economy is much bigger than just the Dow, or the S&P 500, or whatever other number the media is talking about on cable news. On today's show, we turn that wide lens on GE and the Dow to discuss what these popular market indicators really mean and answer the big questions we've been fielding from clients at Keen Wealth.