A few years ago my son and I parked in a parking lot here in Lexington that was filled with Mercedes, BMW’s and Range Rovers. We were in a Honda Accord. My son, 12 at the time with a keen eye for nice autos, remarked that all these car owners must be rich! For a saver like me that was a big, fat softball that I intended to slam out of the park with a valuable life lesson titled, “You aren’t what you drive.”
When I was 15 years old I had a paper route and, with no expenses and no girlfriend, I saved virtually every dime I made. At that same time, I became interested in stocks and investing. Now, I had no clue how stock investing worked and my parents, born 8 years after the Great Depression, viewed the stock market in roughly the same terms as a casino.
Enjoy this month’s edition that features a review of the stock market to date.
Stock Market: At the very moment this is being written the Dow Jones Industrial Average has just passed the 22,000 point mark – the most recent of 30 record-highs during 2017. The S&P 500 also hit new record highs in late July. Through the end of July, the S&P 500 was up nearly 9% from the day President Trump took office. For perspective, that increase has only been surpassed in recent decades by two other new administrations: George W. Bush’s first 6 months in office saw an increase of 20.7% and Barack Obama’s first 6 months in office saw an increase of 22.6%.
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