You all sound like experts in the world of finance, but I wonder how many of you can answer the questions below?

What is the ‘Dow’?

How is the ‘Dow’ calculated?

I hope you  know the right answers. I can tell you that the majority of people out here in the real world cannot answer these questions, including many who make their living in the world of finance.

The famous man-in-the-street is bombarded with these very technical terms and gets worried, a) because they don’t understand them (although they wouldn’t admit it), and b) because an ‘expert’ on the small screen or in a newspaper tells them that downward movement is bad news.

So, how about performing a service for your viewers and readers, with a series of programmes/articles explaining some of the fundamentals of this aspect of our world which seems to affect so much of our lives?

In addition to the questions above, other topics could include:

– showing the calculation of the ‘Dow’ each day

– what is the meaning of ‘the volume of shares traded’

– how many of the shares traded changed hands more than one time in a day?

– how many of which shares were traded?

– discussing what is meant by ‘the market’

– examining the real effect of ‘the market’ on business (what does it mean that £25billion has been wiped off the values of British companies?)

– explaining how the stock market works e.g. every time someone sells, someone buys, and the trading partners are making opposite decisions

– why the supposed experts hardly ever agree on what is going to happen in the future, and almost always get it wrong

With this knowledge, perhaps people (including you) will realise

`the market’ is not an entity in itself, but just the means by which people buy and sell in order to try to make a profit for themselves.