Stock market savvy
Melissa Preddy originally wrote this blog in September as she watched the Dow climb closer to 10,000. Today, it slipped above that mark in intraday trading.
Arcane symbols and hieroglyphics. Wild gesticulation. Chest-thumping, red-faced gurus spouting gibberish-laden predictions based on mysterious code spelled out in tiny black letters.
Some primitive cult ritual? Nope, just another day among the Wall Street pundits.
Sometimes, watching and reading the bombastic babbling that passes for stock market coverage, I feel irritated to think of the dissonance this stirs up in average saving-for-retirement investors.
They’re told to buy low and hold on for the long run. But the analysts gyrate on a minute-by-minute basis, tickers flickering like mad on TV and computer screens, riling up the audience over every fractional gain or loss.
You’ll do your readers a service if you try to stifle the hype. But some Wall Street symbols can’t be ignored, and Dow 10,000 looms.
Most analysts will say it’s just a psychological milestone with no real substantive import, but emotions do have a significant effect on markets, and big round numbers like this tend to make your readers look for an explanation. Especially since it gets the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) back into five-figure territory, if still a ways off the October 9, 2007 peak of 14,164.53.
Prepare now so you can expedite an online Web update when the magic threshold is crossed.
• Line up experts and analysts. Regional economists, certified financial planners (do a zip-code lookup ) and business professors at local colleges can put the move in historical perspective.
• If any of the 30 DJIA components are major employers or otherwise have presence in your area, you might want to line up an interview with their investor relations office and highlight their performance as a news peg for your story. This brochure outlines Dow components since the index was established in 1896.
• Get with graphics and decide what charts you’ll need to order; aside from the standing DJIA historical fever chart, you might want to show intra-day volatility or a list of how regional companies were buoyed.
If you’re going to write about the markets, you should be able to decipher the information on (what used to be) a typical stocks page, at minimum. Most of the basic metrics and measurements are self-explanatory, including the overall trading volume, the ratio of advancers to decliners and percentage changes. The rolling 52-week highs and lows are watched for individual stocks as well as indices. This Dow channel at MarketWatch.com is a very handy live recap of Dow activity; the site offers similar data for other major indices like the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ market.
It gets a lot more arcane; this InvestorWords glossary is a useful site to bookmark if you’re educating yourself about the financial realm.
The point of understanding these measurements is not so much to report them in the abstract – the wire stories can do that – but to mine them for information pertinent to companies and industries your readers care about. If you’re in San Jose or Austin, for example, and the tech sector leads decliners, you’ve got something to write about. If your big local employer gets added to – or kicked off – the Dow components list, readers who rely on the firm for their paychecks and pensions are going to click like mad on your Web update.
Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.
Arcane symbols and hieroglyphics. Wild gesticulation. Chest-thumping, red-faced gurus spouting gibberish-laden predictions based on mysterious code spelled out in tiny black letters.
Some primitive cult ritual? Nope, just another day among the Wall Street pundits.
Sometimes, watching and reading the bombastic babbling that passes for stock market coverage, I feel irritated to think of the dissonance this stirs up in average saving-for-retirement investors.
They’re told to buy low and hold on for the long run. But the analysts gyrate on a minute-by-minute basis, tickers flickering like mad on TV and computer screens, riling up the audience over every fractional gain or loss.
You’ll do your readers a service if you try to stifle the hype. But some Wall Street symbols can’t be ignored, and Dow 10,000 looms.
Most analysts will say it’s just a psychological milestone with no real substantive import, but emotions do have a significant effect on markets, and big round numbers like this tend to make your readers look for an explanation. Especially since it gets the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) back into five-figure territory, if still a ways off the October 9, 2007 peak of 14,164.53.
Prepare now so you can expedite an online Web update when the magic threshold is crossed.
• Line up experts and analysts. Regional economists, certified financial planners (do a zip-code lookup ) and business professors at local colleges can put the move in historical perspective.
• If any of the 30 DJIA components are major employers or otherwise have presence in your area, you might want to line up an interview with their investor relations office and highlight their performance as a news peg for your story. This brochure outlines Dow components since the index was established in 1896.
• Get with graphics and decide what charts you’ll need to order; aside from the standing DJIA historical fever chart, you might want to show intra-day volatility or a list of how regional companies were buoyed.
If you’re going to write about the markets, you should be able to decipher the information on (what used to be) a typical stocks page, at minimum. Most of the basic metrics and measurements are self-explanatory, including the overall trading volume, the ratio of advancers to decliners and percentage changes. The rolling 52-week highs and lows are watched for individual stocks as well as indices. This Dow channel at MarketWatch.com is a very handy live recap of Dow activity; the site offers similar data for other major indices like the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ market.
It gets a lot more arcane; this InvestorWords glossary is a useful site to bookmark if you’re educating yourself about the financial realm.
The point of understanding these measurements is not so much to report them in the abstract – the wire stories can do that – but to mine them for information pertinent to companies and industries your readers care about. If you’re in San Jose or Austin, for example, and the tech sector leads decliners, you’ve got something to write about. If your big local employer gets added to – or kicked off – the Dow components list, readers who rely on the firm for their paychecks and pensions are going to click like mad on your Web update.
Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.
Labels: Dow Jones Industrial Average, investors, Marketwatch, stock market, wall street analysts
posted by Melissa Preddy
at
4:00 PM
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