On Friday, August 28, 2015 at 11:14:20 PM UTC-4, DerbyDad03 wrote:
On Thursday, August 27, 2015 at 9:08:02 AM UTC-4, trader_4 wrote:
On Wednesday, August 26, 2015 at 8:28:46 PM UTC-4, micky wrote:
OT, way OT

Why do they give the Dow Jones, the S&P, and sometimes the NASDAQ all
the time on the news? Who wants to hear it?.

ISTM if one is an investor, in the market for the long hall, keeping
your stocks long enough to make gains long term, it doesn't matter what
stocks do on one day. They could report it every week or month and
that would be plenty.

And if you're a speculator, what does it matter what an average of many
stocks has done? It's what the stock you might buy or sell does that
matters to you. So you still have to check on them.

And yet even mid-morning, -day, and -afternoon 6 minute newscasts at the
top of the hour give partial days' results and number of shares traded.
Why do people care?

A better argument than "who cares" would be that it would seem
anyone who does care almost certainly has a smart phone where you can
see not only the indices, but also your actual stocks. Giving the
updates made more sense decades ago, when there was no easy way
for most people to have any idea of what the markets were doing.
Today, it's mostly just a holdover thing on routine days. On
days where the market is making a big move, then it's certainly
news worthy.

As a side note, for some what the indexes are doing is all that
matters. You can invest in and trade the actual indexes too.

Well, to be more precise, you can invest in ETF's, Mutual Funds and other instruments that mimic various indexes, but you can not invest in an actual index.

An index is nothing more than a mathematical representation of the securities that make up a certain segment or segments of the market. Index mutual funds, Index ETF's, etc. attempt to mimic the returns of a particular index by holding the same securities, in the same percentage, as are listed in the index they are trying to mimic.

I agree, except the part about "attempt" to mimic. They do mimic it very closely because as you point out the fund owns the stocks that make up the
index. The SPDR 500 holds all the stocks that are in the SP500, for example.
The point here was the claim was made that the radio information of what
the market indices were
doing didn't reflect the actual performance for any investors because they
had individual stocks or mutual funds, etc, so their performance was not
going to be the same as the indexes. If you hold the SPDR for the DOW,
whatever the DOW is doing that is reported on the radio is extremely close
to what you're holding. It's not the case for most investors though,
which is why I said it was a side note.