The hype over Tuesday's market drop

I cannot believe the big deal everybody is making over the stock market dip that occurred on Tuesday (Feb 27). Sure the Dow dropped 416 points that day, but that was from a quite lofty 12,632 the day before to a point where it had been only in late November 2006. It's amazing how when the Dow continually hit all time highs just a week or two ago nobody was making a big fuss about it, but when it then drops 4% to end where it was late last fall people are all doom and gloom. If you look at the more broadly based S&P 500 it dropped about 50 points to close at 1399 dropping a more modest 3.47% after it had increased 15.8% in 2006. In fact after yesterday's small rebound to 1406.82 the index is just a little under 10 points under where it was at the end of the year. Big deal. If a 3-4% drop scares people they should not be in the stock market!

Think of poor old Bill Gates. According to the Yahoo Finance, Mr. Gates owns 921 million shares of Microsoft which dropped $1.20 to $27.87/share on Tuesday. So that is right, Bill lost over $1.1 billion from his net worth in one day. Makes you feel for the fellow doesn't it? But since he still owns over $20 billion of the stock I think he will still be comfortable. If you check Microsoft's stock prices it last was under $27.87 back on October 12, 2006, when it had a nice $0.68 increase. So that was only four months ago. I don't think Bill Gates is grumbling over the 4.1% drop in the Microsoft stock price on Tuesday, he is too busy telling lies about how wonderful Vista is (see previous post)!

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