Another 3 Bite the Dust

 

That is one eye-catching logo

That is one eye-catching logo

 

The Dow. Or, in metonymic fashion, simply “the market”. The single quantity most identified with the strength or potency of the economy, particularly its investing arm. We’ve discussed before what exactly the Dow Jones Industrial Average is and how to calculate it, but that was 4 years ago and it’s time for a freshening.

In one sentence, if you’re too lazy or burned out to read the linked article above: Add the stock prices of 30 particular large companies, multiply the sum by a constant, and there’s your Dow index. Mindlessly simple, and either in spite or because of that it’s managed to burrow itself into the collective consciousness. The companies have changed throughout the years, U.S. Leather having less impact on the economy today than it did in 1899, but here are the 27 oldest constituents of the Dow:

3MAmerican ExpressAT&T
BoeingCaterpillarChevron
CiscoCoca-ColaDuPont
ExxonMobilGeneral ElectricWalmart
Home DepotIntelIBM
Johnson & JohnsonJPMorgan ChaseMcDonald’s
MerckMicrosoftDisney
PfizerProcter & GambleTravelers
UnitedHealth GroupUnited TechnologiesVerizon

 

Earlier this month, the 3 remaining slots were occupied by Bank of America, Alcoa, and Hewlett-Packard. Last year the Dow traded out one of its components for another, and this is the first time in 9 years that it’s traded out 3 simultaneously. We’ll get to the newcomers in a minute.

Bank of America, as you may remember from our haranguing of a couple years back, received a direct $45 billion in taxpayer cash, and $5 billion more via equally culpable straw purchaser intermediary American International Group to avoid what 2 presidential administrations feared would be the collapse of the economy. We weren’t close to having that happen, and the bailout did thousands of times more harm than good, but Bank of America has a more effective public relations department than we do. 6 weeks after the cash infusion, B of A stock hit a nadir of $3.14. Within a year the stock price had sextupled, leading B of A management to issue pronouncements; of perfunctory thanks to the helpless taxpayers, and of the promise of happy days ahead to investors and borrowers. Long story short, by the end of the next year the stock had again lost 2/3 of its value. A consistent non-performer drags the value of the index down, so Dow Jones & Company said “enough” and went looking for suitable replacements.

Same deal, to a lesser extent, for Alcoa and Hewlett-Packard. The former is profitable but dwindlingly so, and revenue is down year-to-year for the first time in a long time. Alcoa is an acronym for Aluminum Corporation of America, and aluminum prices have been dropping steadily for the last 2 years. Alcoa isn’t diversified enough to make up for the commodity price drop, and so it did do the Dow adieu.

Did do the Dow adieu. Did do the Dow adieu. In other news, the 6th sick sheik’s 6th sheep’s sick.

Finally, the titan-cum-laughingstock Hewlett-Packard. For those of you either too young to know or too well-balanced in your daily lives to care about this stuff, Bill Hewlett and David Packard were the original Jobs & Woz. H & P started their company in a garage in Palo Alto, the Steves in a garage in Los Altos, 8 miles away.

But a lot has changed since 1939. By the 2010s, Hewlett-Packard was making mistakes almost for the fun of it. The company spent $1.2 billion to buy Palm, and basically wrote the purchase off a year later. They hired an overmatched CEO who didn’t even last a year. He authorized the purchase of Autonomy, and if you think the Palm purchase was stupid at least Palm didn’t publicly overstate its value by $9 billion. Yeah, that was another writeoff. Hewlett-Packard stock free-fell last fall, bounced back this year (doubled, in fact), but that wasn’t enough to keep it in the Dow.

The replacement stocks fit the index as well as any, given the Dow’s implied goals of reflecting the diversity and breadth of the economy. The committee traded out a tech company, a mining company and a bank and replaced them with…a shoe company and 2 more banks.

Notice something about the list of 27? Relatively few of them are full-on consumer companies, selling something you can buy in a store. Thus Nike joined the mix. Not coincidentally, Nike stock is at an all-time zenith. Revenue is growing – arithmetically rather than geometrically, but Nike has been around for a few decades. Add healthy profit margins and a price/earnings ratio with room for growth, and Nike was an easy choice.

Goldman Sachs, profiteers of the 2008 mortgage crisis and beneficiaries of the infamous Troubled Asset Relief Program, replaced Bank of America. An exchange of scoundrels? Perhaps, but the former’s financial statements are far more attractive than the latter’s. Goldman Sachs’s earnings per share is at a record high. Also, it’s the most juiced company in America. Its CEO seems to spend more nights at the White House than Michelle Obama does, and the list of recent Treasury Department upper-level hires reads like the 2002 Goldman Sachs internal phone directory.

That leaves Visa which, curiously, began to trade publicly only in the spring of 2008. (Prior to that Visa was more an agglomeration of companies, more of a “membership association” than a standard stock issuer.) At its initial public offering the stock traded at $44. It’s now within a gallon of gas of $200, and the company enjoys a market capitalization of $125 billion. (Fun Fact: Visa cards debuted in 1958, under the name BankAmericard. A service of…Bank of America. B of A licensed the card to other banks, and by 1970 had effectively ceded control to the entity that would become Visa.)

How does this affect you, the ordinary investor (assuming you’re an ordinary investor)? Minimally, unless your investments’ value derives from the value of the Dow. Or, of course, if you’re long into any of these 6 companies. If your mutual funds are tied to an index, chances are pretty good that it’s the 17-times-broader S&P 500, whose makeup remains unchanged.

Less is More. Even Less is Even More.

That there’s too much information is obvious. So don’t perpetuate the problem.

If you’re reading this, then presumably you’re financially curious if not financially savvy. As the old saying was supposed to go, curiosity killed the overzealous investor. Here, just this once, resist the temptation to check the market daily. It does you no good to let your moods move in sync with what other people are willing to pay for stocks. If the public is an ass, what does that make the person who lets them dictate his behavior? Instead of exposing yourself to numbers that you’re powerless to do anything about anyway, live your life. Walk your dog. Learn HTML. Take shooting lessons. Floss your teeth, which you probably don’t do enough anyway.

The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo! Finance and every general news outlet’s business section each devote a prominent place to the same particular piece of information, listing the index values and changes from yesterday (or from the previous hour, or sometimes the previous minute.) Every change, no matter how minor, becomes newsworthy by definition: otherwise, CNBC and Fox Business would be reporting on something else.

Even no news is news: “Stocks remained largely unchanged today.”

If you’ve ever obsessed about your weight, and most people have, you’ve stepped on the scale daily. (We’re talking to the normal-sized people in the audience, not the fat ones.) It’s not uncommon to weigh yourself twice or even more times a day; say, immediately before and after a workout. (Note to the fat people who are still reading after specifically being told not to a couple of lines ago: a “workout” is this procedure by which you combine aerobic and anaerobic exercise in order to build muscle and burn lipids. “Exercise” is this…oh, never mind.)

Ever been in a relationship where either you or the other person constantly looked for reinforcement? If it happens often enough, suffocation sets in and the relationship crumbles. If he loved you 6 hours ago, and last week, and last month, and a year ago, chances are pretty good he still loves you now.

The week of August 8-12 was an anomaly among weeks on the New York Stock Exchange, with 400-point swings every day. Given the level of the Dow, that means changes of less than 4% every day. Each of which might be meaningful if every jump hadn’t been followed by a fall of similar magnitude, and vice versa.

400-point swings on an index that sits around 11,000 aren’t as important as you think, especially given how fleeting they are. For a comparison, thank God the ordinary digital bathroom scale only gives readouts to the nearest half-pound. There are people reading this right now who would freak out and discover a new thing to obsess over if there existed a commercial scale that could weigh you at 150.3489 pounds first thing in the morning, 151.9849 after breakfast, 150.6227 before lunch and 150.1452 when you went to bed.

Here’s 12 days’ worth of recent market movement:

And 12 months’ worth, each plot point representing the Dow on the 1st day of the given month (or the 31st day of the previous month if the 1st was a Saturday, etc.)

Note the difference in the heights, but also note the difference in the scale.

Most importantly, note the difference in the progression. The same investors and railbirds who were alternately cheering and cursing the market throughout the time span of the first chart could probably look at the second chart with sober happiness, if they a) wanted prices to rise and b) had the capacity to process information at this more deliberate speed.

Seriously, look at the pretty multihued second chart again. Tell the typical investor in September of 2010 that the market is going to do that over the next year, and she’d have been overjoyed. Unless, of course, she was selling everything short. Granted she’d have preferred to have gotten out of the market back in May, but we humans haven’t been equipped with functional hindsight. All in all, the market has shown a consistent path toward growth over the past year. No, it might not in the future. As usual, that’s not the point.

When you check the market as often as it swings, that makes as much sense as a climatologist duly noting that her geographic region of interest warms up every morning yet gets colder every evening.  It’s not that the data means nothing, it’s that it means nothing unless placed in the appropriate context. If you’re a mayfly, or Zsa Zsa Gabor, then go ahead and check stock prices as often as you can. In fact, even that doesn’t make sense because if you’ve only got a short time ahead of you you should be enjoying life, not looking at columns of data.

Most of you are going to check the market tomorrow regardless of what we suggest. If you’re really hungry for information, browse our archives. Or better yet, buy our book and learn what else you should be doing.

**This article is featured in the Yakezie Carnival, The Hurricane Season Edition**