Dear Diary,
Not bad at all. After today’s upswing, it’s like yesterday’s mess never even happened. I’m notching a 46 point gain for today, I’m up 8.4 percent for the month, and my year-to-date return is 4.1 percent.
You wouldn’t have thought I’d be so bubbly given today’s economic data. The Case-Schiller data released today by Standard & Poor’s showed that house prices climbed 3.2 percent year over year in July, slower than a 4.2 percent year-over-year gain for June. Meanwhile, consumer confidence was lower than I would have liked, as was confidence among the great leaders of our nation’s companies.
And you know how I feel about weird robo-trading mini flash crashes. Well, we had a couple of those too, most notably in Apple, which is normally a pretty unassailable stock. Jury’s still out as to whether the downward spike in Apple and other tech stocks today was the same kind of thing we saw during the May 6 flash crash, but I still know one thing conclusively: It gave me the willies.
But somehow, none of that really mattered. I think it’s a case of double-think. Bad economic data can actually be a good thing, if it means the government’s going to come to the rescue and save the economy. And good economic data is a good thing, too, because that means the economy’s doing well.
It’s a weird little mental trick, but it’s one I’m willing to play on myself this September. Things are rolling along rather nicely.
Till tomorrow,
The Dow Jones Industrial Average
