If you have been following the sports headlines, then you know the Super Bowl 51 NFL football championship game between the four-time champion New England Patriots and the zero-time champion Atlanta Falcons is upon us. It’s that time of the year when more than 100 million people will congregate in front of big screen TVs across our nation and stare at ludicrous commercials (costing $5 million each); watch a semi-entertaining halftime show; and gorge on thousands of calories until stomachs bloat painfully.

The other headlines blasting across the media airwaves relate to the new all-time record milestone of 20,000 achieved by the Dow Jones Industrials Average (a.k.a., “The Dow”). For those people who are not glued to CNBC business television all day, the Dow is a basket of 30 large company stocks subjectively selected by the editors of the Wall Street Journal with the intent of creating an index that can mimic the overall economy. A lot of dynamics in our economy have transformed over the Dow’s 132 year history (1885), so it should come as no surprise that the index’s stock components have changed 51 times since 1896 – the most recent change occurred in March 2015 when Apple Inc. (AAPL) was added to the Dow and AT&T Inc. (T) was dropped.

20,000 Big Deal?

The last time the Dow closed above 10,000 was on March 29, 1999, so it has taken almost 18 years to double to 20,000. Is the Dow reaching the 20,000 landmark level a big deal in the whole scheme of things? The short answer is “No”. It is true the Dow can act as a fairly good barometer of the economy over longer periods of time. Over the 1998 – 2017 timeframe, economic activity has almost doubled to about $18 trillion (as measured by Gross Domestic Product – GDP) with the added help of a declining interest rate tailwind.

In the short-run, stock indexes like the Dow have a spottier record in correlating with economic variables. At the root of short-term stock price distortions are human behavioral biases and emotions, such as fear and greed. Investor panic and euphoria ultimately have a way of causing wild stock price overreactions, which in turn leads to poor decisions and results. We saw this firsthand during the inflation and subsequent bursting of the 2000 technology bubble. If that volatility wasn’t painful enough, last decade’s housing collapse, which resulted in the 2008-2009 financial crisis, is a constant reminder of how extreme emotions can lead to poor decision-making. For professionals, short-term volatility and overreactions provide lucrative opportunities, but casual investors and novices left to their own devices generally destroy wealth.