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NEW YORK -- The Dow stock market index flirted with the 14,000 line Friday, bringing reminders of the last time it hit that mark — almost a different era, before the financial crisis rocked the world economy. Propelled by reports on U.S. jobs and auto sales, the Dow Jones industrial average crossed the line and kept its ground through the early afternoon, after flitting back and forth throughout the morning. The other major stock indexes also rose. "There's a newfound enthusiasm for the equity market," said Jim Russell, regional investment director at U.S. Bank Wealth Management in Minneapolis. But market...

Someone has to say it: “Doomsters, you have been wrong now for nearly two years. Why not shut up?” On the one hand doomsters are very profitable for me because they represent the sentiment that makes stocks cheap for me to buy. However, on the other hand, I’m fed up with the bearish pollution sloshing around the media. Are these doomsters making money? If so, how? Of course there are problems, were problems, will be problems. But the credit crunch crash is dead and we are now healing. We will be healing for more years to come. The market will...

The stock market is all about nominal prices. That is, prices that aren't adjusted for inflation or what analysts call "relative performance" -- how an investment has fared when compared with competing assets. While this may seem like a parlor game, comparing how investments fare over time is a key element in portfolio management. Relative performance boils down to this: Sell assets that are historically overpriced, and buy assets that are historically underpriced. The equities industry and the financial media tend to shy away from relative-performance analyses, and a few charts help explain this reticence. But in short, when adjusted...

In the comments of my long-term look at gold Tuesday, somebody passed around this link to a pretty awesome hoard of gold charts. A lot of folks have been asking for a link to a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average priced in terms of gold. Here it is.Gold lovers like to point to the Dow-priced-in-gold graph as some sort of argument ender, showing the superiority of old yeller to other financial assets. I don’t really understand that. In fact, like the proficient Paul Kedrosky, I’m never quite sure what to make of these excercises of pricing one asset...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The summer has come to an end, and so has the market slump that came with it. With little on tap to challenge the recent rally, stocks are on track to close September with the biggest monthly gains in over a year. Though September is typically down month on Wall Street and the economic recovery remains sluggish, investors have taken cues from recent upbeat economic news to propel major indexes sharply higher during the month after a sell-off in August. We've been seeing modestly favorable economic numbers lately, which has allowed markets to keep moving up,"...