swaps

Gone Nowhere in 8 Years

Really interesting data. The secret is not to have a basket of stocks, but invest in just a few stocks that will surge ever higher.
Pick a Hewlett Packard but not a General Motors. But that means you have to diversify after all....to avoid wipe out.
I agree with the observation by Naidle, Juliet and others that the impact from dividends was omitted, but then so was the impact of Federal Reserve inflation, which offsets that (as Jerrydd and others noted).
So a person who wisely invested in a broad basket of DOW stocks overall stayed even, except for losing ground in terms of real inflation.
But the billions paid to stock market order takers and price fixers is where the real action is. They buy the yachts.
Maybe the DOW price performance should be compared with the annual bonus pools paid in this same time frame to investment bankers who "service" the investors..
One could infer in the case of DOW stocks that the investment bankers have added no value over all. But the money they extract from shareholders through the relentless price fluctuations is just a form of what conservatives and libertarians call redistribution of wealth.
If Investment bankers redistribute the wealth to themselves, it is good and un-American to attack it.
This chart also points out that investing is totally obsolete. Just trade trade trade.

Didn't Caterpillar Say Things Were Improving?

Interesting analysis and your judgement of what CAT management said is justified.
CAT management is paid a lot of money to stay on top of their business and industry. They should realize that the rising cost of energy and the evaporatiion of easy money for large-scale construction will impact their business for some time.
The slashed production and idled plants early in the year, so their words in July did not quite match their desperate actions in December.
I am assuming that farm equipment sales may not be as important as industrial machinery, but may I point something out.
A Brigham Young University (Rexburg, Idaho campus) professor, Chet Kendell, did a study indicating that horse traction is more cost efficient than tractor traction on farms up to 350 acres in size. His study, comparing the operating and replacement costs of tractor power versus horse power, actually concluded the cross over point when tractors become more cost efficient was at 174 acres. But the cost of diesel was only $1 a gallon in Kendell's study. He estimated if fuel cost twice as much, then twice as much farmland could be farmed more cost effectively with horses - or about 350 acres at $2 a gallon.
The Amish have prospered without carbon fueled tractors and without the support of the federal farm safety net.
The rush into ethynol was a fiasco and illustrates how it takes a far higher input of energy these days to create energy, or to create food, or to dig huge holes in the ground for high rises that are redundant.
As banks and governments shrink their balance sheets and the scope of their empires, it is logical that industrial empires like CAT will have to retrench for a while too. Maybe forever if this is to be the Asian century.