It was down 200-odd points, then spiked back up to the day’s opening and dropped again. Was this some glitch related to the federal emergency notification test or something?
I’m not sure what system you are looking at, but staring at a tick chart on my data feed(FactSet), the Dow continued to decline after 2pm, hitting a low of 11,760 at 2:27 before bouncing a bit. The closest it was to last nights close was around noon.
I don’t know what chart you looked at, but this chart (make sure you only select for today) shows the DJIA dropped from the opening bell and never recovered.
Rapid fluctuations in the DOW are only a trivial representation of even the Stock Market, much less the entire economy. When prices go up, large fund investors take profits, and drive the price down. The volume is generally fairly low. When the market falls, said large fund investors buy back in, since money on the sidelines is earning nothing. Again the volume is generally low. Because the volume is low, the volatility reflects very little in terms of actual change in the companies being traded.
Also, never forget that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a highly artificial construct, slavishly locked into its antecedent assumptions from early in the last century. It’s only thirty companies. Every single one of them could go entirely belly up, and yet the world would continue to turn. It only drives the market because most investors, even the professionals buy on the basis of buying and selling trends on an hourly to weekly range, without any consideration of what is being manufactured, where, why, and for whom.
Spend your time examining the actual companies you want to buy, and buy them for reasons that relate to what they do, and how well they have done it over decades. Trends are a way to get your stock at the lowest probable price. Today I put in a limit order as soon as I saw the prices dropping, so that if they fell far enough on one particular stock I wanted to buy already, I could get in at a very good price. It didn’t fall far enough, so I didn’t buy anything.
Tris
I looked at two charts (sorry, not sure which ones) and they both showed the same thing… down about 200 all day, a jump back up to the opening for approximately one minute, then back down. Obviously not “real” – i.e., there’s no way the DJI actually made an instant jump up to the opening and then an instant jump back down – so I was wondering what would make the chart do that.
Bad data. The major data providers will adjust their charts/prices when they notice things like that.
Thanks. I just got an update to my browser and the default search engine switched from Google to Inbox, which I am finding to be crappy… I think it probably just came up with some lousy charts.