Show me the (real) money

 

“And you thought you had broken even. If investors had bought gold when the Dow first closed above 10,000 in March 1999, they’d be up almost 280%. Put another way, Dow 10,000 a decade ago “cost” 36 ounces of gold, treating each Dow point as $1. When the Dow revisited that level Wednesday, it was worth only 9.276 ounces of gold. In oil terms, the Dow has gone from 609 barrels to 133.”

 

-       The Wall Street Journal on ‘Dow 10,000’.

 

 

There were somewhat half-hearted celebrations last week when an antediluvian stock index representing 30 companies selected by the editors of the Wall Street Journal crossed the 10,000 level. Again. This stock index, which is most affected by the change in the share price of an 85-year-old computer company, because it’s a price-based and not value-weighted index, has been here before – as the graph below shows:

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Comments

[Tim Coldwell]

"In oil terms, the Dow has gone from 609 barrels to 133.”

Is that inflation or deflation to an economist?

[strainer3]

This whole free lunch thing can only last for so long, eventually we'll have to pay the piper for the reckless decisions of our government. And I think that until the govt addresses the basic structural problems in our financial system of too much debt, we will not have a sustainable recovery. So while the stock market can stay irrational in the shorter term, in the long run I believe it will go back to reflecting the fundamentals of our boom and bust economy. And that's why I still feel that for long term investors a better portfolio allocation is in cash and gold. I think the gold price will continue to rise due to a lack of faith in central banks' policies and in fiat currencies. I recently read a good article on this topic called Gold Price Wobbles Under $1,130 But U.S. Dollar Future Bleak, which discusses the relationship between the dollar, the gold price, and gold mining companies as a result of the Federal Reserve's monetary policies. I thought it was especially helpful for investors to read to get a better sense of the relationship between these asset classes given all the uncertainty in the economy.