Small Fish, Big Pond

The gains in the last week have been almost too rapid that I think we’ll still see days below 8500 in the future. But like I said this is far better than I think anybody could have hoped for at the beginning of this year. Unfortunately the real world we live in feels the fallout longer than the market so even if we jump to 10,000 by Christmas (could you imagine!!) then it will still take a year or so for the real world to stabilize under the highs of Wall Street.

It’s funny that I hear people now saying that with the market at 9000 already that it’s proof that the stimulus bills were unneeded. Um… I think the reason it’s this high already is BECAUSE OF the stimulus bills; this is exactly what they were supposed to do, they just did it better and faster than we thought they would.

That was me in July. Today the DOW broke 10,000 (hasn’t closed yet so I don’t know if it will last the day). All I can say is that from a financial perspective I’m loving it. In May I calculated that if the DOW had stopped at 8000 my 401k would have generally fully recovered in August of this year, every point beyond has just been multiplying my gains.

I never though we’d recover to 10k within the year, let alone by October. Now if we could just get businesses to calm down and start hiring again we’ll be good.

Technically the market hasn’t really done anything ground breaking today, 10000 is an arbitrary number, the real big events occurred in March and July, and today is no different than the last couple months of growth. The point is that it’s a generally steady rise upward to this point which is good.

On the otherhand if you’ve been planning on investing to take advantage of the low market the door is closing; it can’t go up forever and the real time to jump onboard was the first half of this year. Still it’s good to invest over long periods anyway; so there’s no reason to wait before re-investing in the market (my co-workers think this is crazy and that Obamma is going to destroy the market and the country in the next year or so, but I work in the reddest area of the reddest state). If you haven’t felt confident about the market in over a year now is the time to get your feet wet again.

This is all very reassuring news that the economy has more bright days ahead of it than dark.