Next -- Dow 15,000 or 10,000?

Stocks go up, stocks go down.

Do you feel poorer today than you did a week ago, thanks to the 700 pount loss in the Dow Jones Industrial Average?

If so, may I suggest that you need to rethink your investment strategy?
Another long time aphorism came to my mind in thinking about the latest decline in the Dow -- easy come, easy go.

The DJIA went from 13,000 to 14,000 in just 56 days.

Did that 7.7% rise in under 2 months reflect the American economy rising 7.7% in under 2 months? Of course not.

Yet a week ago, millions of investors were once again congratulating themselves on how smart they were to be buying stocks. I have o quarrel with that in general -- it's when you start thinking of market price rises as cash in your pocket, that I suggest you're out of touch with reality.

The truth is, we don't know the future. I don't know whether the market is going to rise or fall tomorrow, and neither do you. Nor do any of the paid commentators and talking heads.

What's more, we have no idea whether the DJIA has attained any unpenetrable "floor" . . . is there an absolute limit on how fair the DJIA can go down now that's at just over 13,000 and has been over 14,000?

We'd like to think that the DJIA will never see 10,000 or 7,000 or 1,000 again -- but we don't know. You have no guarantees. What if Al Quaida terrorists succeeded in setting off atomic or dirty bombs in multiple major American cities, including Manhattan where the New York Stock Exchange is based? How far down would the DJIA go? Who knows? Will that ever happen? I sure hope not. But we have no guarantees.

Nor do we have guarantees against biochemical terrorism, or a natural problem such as bird flu or natural catastrophes such as the flooding global warming allegedly will bring.

The trouble with called price rises in your stocks "capital gains" is that they all too often don't reflect real gains in REAL capital. The traditional economic definition of "capital" is not simply a profit made selling an investment -- that's the IRS's definition -- no, it's the productive assets of one kind or another.

Land, warehouses, forklift trucks, patents. Cash in the bank is simply the liquidity used to obtain capital assets or to pay the expenses associated with running them.

If the stock market were strictly rational, the price of a company's stock would go up only to the degree that the company achieved success in expanding its net capital assets. The price of the overall stock market would go up only to the extent that overall economic activity expanded the value of the country's net capital assets.

Obviously, the stock market is not strictly rational. Efficient, yes -- but not rational.

Of course, a strictly rational stock market would not go up or down in sharp, fast bursts. It wouldn't be so exciting, but you would still have the advantage of participating in the overall growth of the nation's economy. That's still a big advantage over money market accounts.

And if you buy only stock that pays dividends, then you get quarterly checks in your mailbox whether the market price is up or down. Use this drop in the Dow to buy dividend-paying stocks cheap.

They may never be this low again.

(Or maybe they'll get a lot lower -- but you don't know that, and you don't know when. So buy now to start collecting dividend checks now.)


Dow down 700
Dow down 700