An abundance of numbers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (from an Al Jazeera Web page, photograph by Jeenah Moon, courtesy of Reuters)
My wife and I have a broker who has helped us manage a portfolio consisting heavily of mutual funds, making for a relatively stable foundation for our assets. Nevertheless, I usually follow the stock market indices for the United States, Europe, and Asia on a daily basis. I set up the graphs for my Stocks app to account for a week’s worth of data, which I have found to be the right window for observing how those indices rise and fall.
I turned to those graphs this morning after reading the Al Jazeera article with the headline:
US stocks near record high, oil falls as Trump claims Iran talks under way
followed by the sub-headline:
Benchmark S&P 500 approaches all-time peak as Washington, Tehran offer conflicting accounts of status of talks.
Because the site is Al Jazeera, the article was filed eleven hours ago, meaning that it was written after yesterday’s markets closed and before today’s opened. Standard & Poor was definitely off to a good start this morning, which one might almost call a surge. However, it appears that Al Jazeera did not take the trouble to compare those numbers with the Nasdaq index, which took a similar surge, but in the opposite direction! Europe is currently mixed with the most positive advance coming from the German DAX index. Indices for the United Kingdom (Financial Times) and France were both volatile, both closing lower than when they opened. Asia seems to be less volatile, although I wonder how Singapore feels about the current decline in the Straits Times Index!
The only lesson I can take away from this morning’s experience is that, whatever my sources for news may be, I can rely on my yahoo/finance app to “compare and contrast” the indices over a one-week window; and, for now at least, I feel as if things are about as stable as I can expect in the current context of world news reports!
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