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Actually the market re-opened on Monday Sept 17 at 9294.55 and proceeded to lose over a thousand points until it bottomed out at Friday's close.

A friend of mine used to have a list of the slit-your-wrist statistics that fell in place on that Friday. I can't remember all of them but things like advance/decline ratios the lowest in a hundred years, etc.

That Friday marked the lowest sentiment readings in the history of the market and launched a rally that took the Dow to 10,500. Pretty amazing stuff in the middle of a bear market and following the attack.

Unfortunately the Dow made new lows a year later around 7300 and the S&P didn't cross above its 200 day moving average until April of 03 which is the last line in the sand to get fully invested.

The rest is, as they say, history. All the while we were in "the worst economy since Hoover". LOL.

BUT!

The "Hype" of the DOW (at first - it REALLY only rose strongly AFTER the Repubbies got the House in 94, then grew from 94-98) during the Clinton years by the media, then the NASDAQ (from 98-99 when the DOW went flat) was NOT really what the companies were worth.

Make sense? It was "tulip money" based on hype and speculation about the dotcom industry and the low oil prices.

Now, after 6 years of growth in the economy, balanced by REAL growth in the value of the companies as the stock prices dropped, flattened, then slowly recovered means that the REAL (minus inflation) value of the companies is actually reflected by stock prices.

Make sense? Earlier, the DOW stock prices were artificially too high - then they dropped too far after 9/11 and the democrats' incessant demand for recession news, then they took a long time to recover back to where it should be.

A steady 2-4% growth in the economy from 2000 to now means that the DOW SHOULD be shortly above all-time highs again.