As the stock market has gone up over time, that 1,000 points isn t what it used to be, that when the stock market was 1000, a thousand points was doubling the stock prices. I hear you. All right now, it went to 6000 today. No, because stock prices fluctuate, and that is a normal feature of financial markets, that some days they go up, some days they go down. Now for those of us with our, our retirement money invested in the stock market, one thing we need to remember is that stock prices do fluctuate.
Nobody really knows.
In politics, there s conventional wisdom. We could be. Well, stock prices are often considered a leading indicator of economic behavior because investors invest in the stock market when they expect the economy to do well, when they expect companies to be earning lots of money and paying larger dividends, they re naturally going to buy stock prices, however, the, um, stock prices tend to be somewhat skittish because stock prices are based on people s expectations of what those future earnings and dividends are going to look like. And the crowd psychology can change overnight if some bit of news comes out that makes investors think that the world is going to be different than what they thought it was going to be. For example, when Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack, the stock market dropped 6 percent in one day as a result, so that again, you know, that kind of thing can happen.