Our Weekend Word

I would venture to guess the majority, if not all of you know who Warren Buffett is. If not, maybe you have heard of Geico, Dairy Queen, Fruit of the Loom, Brooks Sports, or Duracell.  Those aforementioned companies are subsidiaries of Berkshire Hathaway, whose CEO and majority shareholder is, Warren Buffett (See? It all came full circle).

The Dow broke 20,000 this week. Yay! That’s lovely and all, but what does that actually mean to investors.

What it means

Social and economic inequality is something that has been a widely-publicized problem for a few years now.  The cause really took root in the 2011 protest dubbed “Occupy Wall Street”.   During about a 2-month period, protestors occupied Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district in order to raise awareness for their cause.  Little came from the Occupy Wall Street movement, but the phrase “we are the 99%” took root.

In 1955 Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made an observation that has since been dubbed “Moore’s Law”. Moore’s Law is easily summed up to say the computing speed of technology will double every 18 months. While this amazing feat has been true for the last 60 years, some speculate we could see this trend die in 2017.  As how much faster we can make our processors comes into question, many people have deemed the future of the technology sector to be, not hardware, but software based.

All Time High

There I said it, this year has been an absolute whirlwind. I think unprecedented would be a good word for 2016 all around. Let’s recap some of those head shakers we saw come to pass this year.

• The year started off with a bang. Delivering us the worst opening 10 days to the S&P 500 in history. Lovely start.

As we move further away from the election and closer to the new year the market continues to chug forward. Whether this is related to the holiday season or the outcome of the presidential election remains to be seen, but the market is setting all-time highs as the Dow approaches 20,000 (expect a Weekend Word touching on this subject in early January).

In August, we sent out a Weekend Word touching on Uber rolling out driverless cars in Pittsburgh (Click here for a refresher) and some more interesting news has come out on the subject that we felt was worth mentioning.  Turns out this is likely only the beginning of a much larger change.

As the saying goes, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.  Unfortunately, that rings true for many facets of life, but one would hope that it wouldn’t apply to getting a college education.  On December 2^nd, Reuters published an article shining a light on two American “business men”, Thomas Benson and Stephen Gessner who have been providing international students with an unfair advantage.

All of us in the investment community watch “the market” pop up and down every day. But what is “the market”? What we look at to gauge our markets are stock indices, namely the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), and the NASDAQ Composite Index. For the past couple years we’ve gotten used to seeing these move in-step with each other, but after the election we saw some pretty interesting daily differences in trading. Why is that?