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The last time the NASDAQ closed higher than 4,500 was March 2000. That’s more than 14 years ago. That was before 9/11, before the fall of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, or Osama bin Laden. It was before the sub-prime lending crisis and the bank bailout. It was before Facebook was born, and even before an obscure junior senator from Illinois, named Barack Obama, gave an attention-grabbing keynote address that did more to get himself elected four years later than it did to help Al What’s His Name.
The sheer fact that the NASDAQ has surpassed that mark (it closed at 4,508.31 today) is worth writing about. The markets closed a few minutes ago on the U.S. east coast, so the stories are just starting to flash across the wires. What I find interesting is that the early consensus goes something like this: “The NASDAQ reached a 14-year high due to a lack of major economic or geo-political news.”
Are you kidding me?
Have we lost our collective minds? Is the stock market really affects in that much proportion to the news as it is reported? How can anyone say with a clear conscience that a lack of geo-political news is the underlying reason that the NASDAQ gained 0.9%? And exactly how little geo-political news does it take to make any of the market indices go up or down?
I’ll grant you that turmoil can cause anxiety and that anxiety can cause some people to trade some securities, but either a bunch of reporters are copying what one nitwit said to there are a collective bunch of nitwits writing (other) financial columns for places other than ADVFN.
Think for a minute.
Think with me about what geo-political things are not happening today that would stimulate an increase in the NASDAQ.
- Civil war in Syria? Nope. Still happening. People still dying.
- A Nuclear Iran? Nope. Just one day closer.
- ISIS slaughtering hundreds in Iraq? Nope. Hasn’t stopped. No one but ISIS thinks it’s good news.
- Ferguson, Missouri? No way. I doubt that riots in the suburbs of St. Louis would be the impetus for any major investors to make decisions on the scale of index-adjusting.
- Conflict in Gaza? I don’t think so. If anything, investors, if they were interested, would be on tenterhooks waiting to see what happens when the current cease-fires ends.
- Conflict in the Ukraine? Really? Someone is going to have to explain how that is going to affect the NASDAQ.
So far, the only thing that I can come up with to explain the return of the NASDAQ to 4,500 is the news over the weekend that President Obama had a vacation from hell. I can see a lot of people being happy at his inconvenience that he had to cut short a round of golf or miss a clambake.
It is what it is.
The fact is that the NASDAQ continued its upward trend and that it is a result of the sum total of trading today. It was a result of many things. It’s just that nothing particularly spectacular happened. It is what it is and that’s all that it is.
