DJIA Meaningless or Rigged?

[SleeplessinSoCal]

Can billionaires manipulate through dolling out investments in order to make it appear like nothing bad is happening?

For the first time in my 77 years I have investments in the stock market. As long as my friend is in charge of monitoring them, I feel fairly safe. I don't want to bug her right now. But I'm so puzzled by what ISN'T happening. Like a complete crash that would have happened in the past given the upheaval and international uncertainty.

It closed up despite insane policies and shenanigans by WH.

What is going on?

[zipplewrath]

1. Welcome to the markets

Never confuse the markets with the economy. And never confuse "indexes" like DJIA, NASDAQ, NIKKEI, S&P, etc. with individual market segments or stocks. Your investments can do bad when your friends are okay, and your friends can be suffering when your investments are soaring. Also, markets tend to try to predict the future. They are not always right by any means. But for example, tariffs were "built into the market" when he got elected. They are now reacting to what they believe will be true in about 12 weeks.

The best advice I ever got was that for the "casual investor" your goal is "time in the market" not "timing the market". They'll go up and down and don't really expect to know why.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

2. They say the S&P 500 is a better indicator

The Dow's number is drawn from 30 different stocks. The DJIA also contains fewer stocks, which could exhibit higher risk; however, it could be less volatile when the market is rapidly rising or falling due to its components being well-established large-cap companies

[onenote]

3. It closed up for several reasons:

One is that Trump delayed certain tariffs, leaving hope that other tariffs also might be mitigated in some fashion/
Another is that after declining 1300 points in two days, it was all but inevitable that stocks would rebound somewhat.

Even before today's partial rebound, the Dow, NASDAQ and S&P all were substantially higher than they were 1 year ago.