At our 2017 Holiday Breakfast, Matt Wilson and I gave a presentation to our clients, families, and friends that analyzed the state of the economy at the end of a record year and attempted some predictions for where we could be headed in 2018.

So, halfway through the year, how’d we do?

At the risk of jinxing it, I’d say pretty good!

My Keen Wealth team expected some market volatility heading into the new year, but we felt that solid economic growth would help prevent a major downturn. And that’s pretty much where we’re sitting in July of 2018, although the current flat markets and our ongoing political dramas do have some investors nervous.

On today’s show, we talk about what happened in the first six months of the year and try to anticipate how those events and trends might be setting us up for the second half of 2018.

When people ask, “How’s the market doing?” the response is typically based on how the Dow Jones Industrial Average is doing (Dow for short). The Dow has been around since the late 1800s, so it has a long history of measuring how the US stock market has performed.

Despite its popularity and longevity, the Dow has some quirks that make it not necessarily the best way to measure how the overall US stock market is performing.

Recently, the powers that be decided to drop an iconic company that had been in the index off and on for more than 100 years. General Electric was one of the original companies in the index back in 1896 and has been continuously in the index since 1907. But not anymore.

One of my core philosophies is that a successful investment strategy depends on viewing our economy through a very wide lens. And just as the Dow is bigger than GE, our economy is much bigger than just the Dow, or the S&P 500, or whatever other number the media is talking about on cable news.

On today's show, we turn that wide lens on GE and the Dow to discuss what these popular market indicators really mean and answer the big questions we've been fielding from clients at Keen Wealth.