When the stock market started shooting up to 10,000, I started going "HUH?".

When I was a kid, my dad took the WSJ. His company started offering stock options to the blue collar guys and my dad decided he needed to understand this new benefit. As a result, I had not only the Chronicle and Time, but now the WSJ to absorb (I was a word sponge at 9). I learned how to read the stock pages and how to follow the ups and downs and what all that crap meant. As I also read some of the articles, if I understood them or not, I started connecting what the articles said with what the numbers did. It was like a game. It was fun.

Jump forward a few decades.

I don't read the financial pages any more, but some of what I learned then, seems to have stuck at a very deep level. *Nothing* about the 10,000 level in the market made sense. I couldn't figure out where the *stuff* was coming from to generate that kind of rise, especially since it didn't just peak weirdly and then settle. (This is where I should also say that I never did understand economics when I took it. The whole discipline seems completely counter-intuitive and I'm leery of things that are counter-intuitive.)

What I'm hoping I'll learn when I watch those shows is something to explain that. What I *fear* is that it's *all* been manipulation and fraud.

I have nothing in the market and I'm so very happy for that. The stock market isn't an "investment", it's a gamble and I never gamble what I can't afford to lose.