Each day, investors are treated to news about the economy and information about how the stock market has done recently. It can be very difficult to process what's going on because at any given moment in time, there may be very little correlation between how things are going in the real world and how prices are acting on Wall Street.
"There's an excitable dog on a very long leash in New York City, darting randomly in every direction. The dog's owner is walking from Columbus Circle, through Central Park, to the Metropolitan Museum. At any one moment, there is no predicting which way the pooch will lurch." I use this analogy all the time to help people understand how the economy and stock market play off of each other. One of the hardest things to do as an investor is to entertain two opposing thoughts in our minds at once, and find a way to keep them despite the cognitive dissonance this can produce.
But most of the time, neither the economy nor the stock market is as good as it could get, or as bad as it could get. Typically, the economy trudges along a straight path for years at a time and it's the stock market that is easily excitable, ripping to and fro based on the latest information to hit the tape. Over longer periods of time, we do see a correlation between stocks and the economy, but over periods of less than a year, there is literally no rhyme or reason for what has happened.
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