How is Your Money Doing? Here's the February Dow Scoreboard, Day 5

In the sports world, all manner of statistics and scenarios are routinely trotted out in attempts to reinforce how one team or player is better than another. All of this analysis is done every day on TV and radio talk shows, but the in the final analysis, as so perfectly expressed by the king of sports talk radio, Jim Rome, is "scoreboard," as in, who won the game, no matter the stats.

The same kind of metric can easily be applied to stocks and investments, as it no doubt should be. Thus, there's no need for analysis, no need for bald-headed, econo-speak commentators, no need for inverse correlations, causations, or extrapolations. All that matter can be found in the daily closing prices for individual stocks, or for individual stock indices, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the measure by which everybody measures success.

Over the past four trading sessions, there's been more than sufficient ammunition for all kinds of wild speculation and analysis of what happened and why, and there may be a thousand reasons why the Dow and other indices were slaughtered last Friday and again this Monday. The more simplistic answers appear in the comeback sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday, which failed to recoup all of the losses. Thus, it's all in the scoreboard, i.e., the daily closes on the Dow. Nothing more, nothing less. No analysis necessary. You either won or you lost.

Let's just track the Dow through the month of February and see how well those precious stocks are doing.

Here are the only numbers that matter:

Dow Jones Industrial Average dates, closing prices, gains or losses:

Date	Close	Gain/Loss	Cum. G/L
2/1/18	26,186.71	+37.32	+37.32
2/2/18	25,520.96	-665.75	-628.43
2/5/18	24,345.75	-1,175.21	-1,803.64
2/6/18	24,912.77	+567.02	-1,236.62
2/7/18	24,893.35	-19.42	-1,256.04

So, as can clearly be seen, even adding in the smallish gain on Feb. 1, the Dow is down a massive amount. The contention here at Money Daily is that there has been a sea change in the market. Not only is a correction in the works (-10%), but a bear market (-20%) is quickly developing. We'll keep tracking so you at home can keep score on your "investments."

At the Close, Wednesday, February 7, 2018:
Dow Jones Industrial Average, 24,893.35, -19.42 (-0.08%)
NASDAQ: 7,051.98, -63.90 (-0.90%)
S&P 500: 2,681.65, -13.49 (-0.50%)
NYSE Composite: 12,714.83, -30.62 (-0.24%)