Johno, Agree I am also confounded by the Dow's seemingly bulletproof progress, and have been for some time. I have rationalised this in a number of ways. Firstly the Dow consists of only 30 really big companies, and is manipulated to include companies that have a high growth potential. If you look at past members of the Dow, when they showed signs of poor revenue or profit growth they were kicked out pretty quickly, and a new go-getter gets put in. If you look at the US S&P 500 performance it is a different story. It is at 1312 points as of last night. It was higher on Dec 31 1998!!!, at 1329, when the ASX was at 2813. So maybe we are halfway between the Dow and S&P 500. I think the Dow is an over performer index, which maybe gets too much publicity, but everyone reacts to it.
