THE "HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF" EDITION
6 JANUARY 2011
SURPRISE, SURPRISE?
Stock Market Posts 11 Percent Gain in 2010
Those of us who are in it for the long haul hate to say it, but we told them so. (OK, so maybe a little bit of gloating is in order.)
Predictions that the stock market would never recover from the hit it took in late 2008 had a hollow ring to them as the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 11,577 on New Year's Eve, posting an 11 percent gain for 2010.
Your reporter duly notes that, in a recent column, Detroit Free Press reporter Susan Tompor seemed shocked not only in the Dow's final close for 2010, but also in the resurgence of the auto industry. Have members of the media not yet learned that history repeats itself?
Stop by The Exchange for a link to the article and a chance to post your thoughts.
On to more of this week's headlines . . .
GET THE NEW YEAR OFF TO A GREAT START
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YOUR BURNING TECH QUESTIONS . . . ANSWERED!
Jan. 17 SC Forum Workshop to Feature Guru Sean Pulrang
This is your chance to get the answers to all of your burning tech support questions. A member of StockCentral's very own Support Staff, Guru Sean Pulrang, will lead a Workshop in the Community Forum beginning Jan. 17.
Development for this Workshop's content is under way, so if you have a topic you'd like to see covered, now's the time! E-mail SC Community Leader Amy Rauch Neilson, who will be hosting the sessions, with your ideas and suggestions.
And don't forget — you are invited to post your questions and comments for Sean in the Workshop Forum beginning Jan. 17. See you there!
CHANGEOVER COMPLETE
New SC Data Stream to Provide Faster Updates
Speaking of burning questions, SC member Jeff Traeger recently posted this query in The Infirmary:
I was running a portfolio update this morning and all my stocks came up with out-of-date data, which was not the case a few days ago. I updated all the stocks in the library and everything seems OK now, but what happened? Is this due to the database change over?
The response, posted by SC founder Doug Gerlach:
"BetterInvesting's data service is still offered for BetterInvesting members and is separate from the StockCentral service. We still offer the Take Stock figures in our service, which they don't, and there are some other differences between the two subscriptions.
"StockCentral did, however, change over our data to a new stream from Morningstar at the same time that BI switched to that same new stream from their old S&P plan. This is sort of a 'new and improved' data stream that Morningstar has introduced for its institutional customers, and so there are likely to be lots and lots of small changes to the data that you see in Toolkit. (One of the benefits of the new stream is that it should provide somewhat faster updates to quarterly and annual results than the old stream did.)
"As a result, any number of these mostly minor changes or 'fresher' data could trigger Toolkit to see that 'new' data is available on the server and flag those companies accordingly. The switchover happened on or around 12/22/2010. I think these changes are what is triggering the behavior that you're seeing."
TODAY'S ENTIRELY RELEVANT QUOTATION
"If 2010 taught us one lesson, it was that stocks still work."
— Detroit Free Press columnist Susan Tompor