The Dow Jones

[Cant_Be_Faded]

Anyone watching the dow jones right now?

It's going down hardcore, 2000-bush era style

[SpursWoman]

Actually, that's 2000 pre-Bush Era Style.

[Cant_Be_Faded]

no it continued to go low after the elections...I remember cuz that was in the fall when mookie moved to austin.



but seriosly, it went from 64 down to 85 down in like 10 minutes

[SpursWoman]

I know it continued to, but it started long before the elections.


When I left for lunch the bank along 410 was flashing down 68-something. :fro

[SWC Bonfire]

Well, get your roll out and get ready to buy in, right? :lol

[Cant_Be_Faded]

maybe Jim could lend me enough money to buy 100 shares of Anti-Avian Flu

[RandomGuy]

10,255.57 -89.41 (-0.86%) (Dow)
2,069.80 -30.25 (-1.44%) (Nasdaq)

http://finance.yahoo.com/

Swings of around 1% are fairly commonplace. The Nasdaq is taking a beating and will likely continue to do so.

Example of how accounting issues affect the real world:

In the past, companies have been able to "hide" the true costs of their employee stock options by not treating them as what they really are: a form of salary.

A recent change has forced companies to start treating these stock options (the ability to buy company shares at prices below market value) more like cash salaries and this affects the financial reports by making it seem that the companies are suddenly spending more on paying people and reducing their net profitability.

Tech industries tend to rely heavily on these options, and as company financials reflect this change more and more, investors are going to see "sudden" drops in profitability. The reality is that the companies are as profitable as they always were, but people just got used to higher profit numbers, and will be a bit freaked out by the sudden lower figures.

The Nasdaq, since it is a bit more tech-heavy will probably feel a bit more of the brunt of the disappointment than the Dow.

If you invest a lot, look for the FASB 123(r) section of your publicly traded companies financial reports for the bottom line figures. Most companies that I found in a recent bit of research I did for a paper on this subject haven't made the conversion yet, but have a footnote (waaaay in the back) explaining what their financials will look like after this happens.

For anybody remotely interested here is a real example:
http://www.merck.com/finance/annualreport/ar2003/financial_section/merck2003_ar_financials.pdf
On page 34 in the "notes of accounting principles" (it is page 19 in my browsers reader), look for "Stock based compensation".
You will notice that the Net Income for the company before the change is listed as $6.83Bn. After the change: $6.27Bn, this is over $500,000,000 difference (roughly 8% if memory serves) and the percentage drop in the profit numbers of tech companies is even higher.

I'm not saying that there is a causal effect here, but this is simply a bit of information that the market will increasingly digest.