The other day, an acquaintance reminded me that all the doom and gloom out there about the economy is all wrong, things are great and the stock market, the DOW, keeps going up he explained.
Yes, that's true, but might I help everyone's recollection that the DOW recently took some companies off the index and put other companies onto it.
What if they didn't do that? Well, in that case the DOW wouldn't have done so well in the last three weeks sense.
Okay so, let's talk shall we? The reason is because we seem to be stacking the deck more and more often.
It's not that we haven't done this all along, it's that we seem to be doing it at a faster rate.
I invite anyone from Fact Check to prove that wrong.
The charts speak for themselves or do they? No actually they don't because I haven't seen any chart like that.
With Germany's DAX they track the stock prices, but also track how the reinvestment of stock buy backs and dividends.
Those companies that do and don't - very revealing.
The New York Times had an interesting article published on September 10, 2013 titled; "Dow Index Drops Bank of America, Alcoa, and HP" by William Alden which stated; "The Dow Jones industrial average is shaking up its roster.
Alcoa, Bank of America and Hewlett Packard - three stalwarts of corporate America that have fallen out of favor lately with investors - will be removed from the Dow, to be replaced by Goldman Sachs, Visa and Nike, the parent company of the index said.
" "Fallen out of favor with investors?" Well companies fall in and out of favor from time to time based on their performance.
If we only pick the strongest and best companies for the Dow and we change accordingly just to ensure that we prop up the index, then in a way we are putting lipstick on a pig and falsifying the reality of the market for investors, FDI (foreign direct investment), policy makers, and pension funds.
I've seen many a long-term Dow chart with the X-axis spanning 40-60 years showing that if you had invested and just left your money in those companies on the Dow, how much you'd have made in growth.
The only problem is most all of those companies have been changed out since then.
Just picking the winners and chucking the losers along the way - is no way to judge the average of the strength of our nation's industrial capacity and growth.
Now then most economic numbers we get from governments; China, the EU, or our own are to be taken with a grain of salt, yes, I realize that, but if we are putting bad data in we automatically get bad data out.
So, what's the real news, show me the real chart, without the changes.
Please consider all this and think on it.