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Martha Muller
Louisville, KY
Currently unemployed

Topic tree:
- All Together Now
- LBJ
- Fictional Families
- A Night to Remember
- Atonement
- Best Sellers
- The Dow
- Little Ricky
- Keep on Truckin'
- Famous Tots
- Count'em Down
- Try the Dip
- Dirt Devils
- Love Songs
- Something Fishy

The $16K Martha is about to go for couldn't have come at a better time. She's had to delay her career to take care of her mother. She's been looking for a job for about a year and has had lots of interviews but no success so far.

Martha still has her PAF, ATE and DD lifelines. The expert is Jonathan Ringen, managing editor of Rolling Stone Magazine. Meredith says that Jonathan knows a lot about a lot of things but music is his specialty.

$16K - Used to gauge the performance of the stock market, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average tracks how many companies?
A - 30
B - 150
C - 500
D - 1,200

Martha doesn't know, so she uses her ATE lifeline, stopping the clock with 20 seconds remaining.

ATE conversation

Jonathan says he knows more about the stock market now than he did a couple weeks ago. He
reads the question and says, "This is difficult." He asks what Martha thinks; she says maybe it deals with the Fortune 500, so maybe the question isn't as difficult as she first thought. Jonathan says that he agrees with her and if he were in the Hot Seat that's what he'd choose.

Martha decides to go with her instincts, choosing

Spoiler

C. 500

.

Spoiler

A - 30 (15)

Martha goes home with $1K.

BBTranscriptTeam wrote:Martha Muller
Louisville, KY
Currently unemployed

Topic tree:
- All Together Now
- LBJ
- Fictional Families
- A Night to Remember
- Atonement
- Best Sellers
- The Dow
- Little Ricky
- Keep on Truckin'
- Famous Tots
- Count'em Down
- Try the Dip
- Dirt Devils
- Love Songs
- Something Fishy

The $16K Martha is about to go for couldn't have come at a better time. She's had to delay her career to take care of her mother. She's been looking for a job for about a year and has had lots of interviews but no success so far.

Martha still has her PAF, ATE and DD lifelines. The expert is Jonathan Ringen, managing editor of Rolling Stone Magazine. Meredith says that Jonathan knows a lot about a lot of things but music is his specialty.

$16K - Used to gauge the performance of the stock market, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average tracks how many companies?
A - 30
B - 150
C - 500
D - 1,200

Martha doesn't know, so she uses her ATE lifeline, stopping the clock with 20 seconds remaining.

ATE conversation

Jonathan says he knows more about the stock market now than he did a couple weeks ago. He
reads the question and says, "This is difficult." He asks what Martha thinks; she says maybe it deals with the Fortune 500, so maybe the question isn't as difficult as she first thought. Jonathan says that he agrees with her and if he were in the Hot Seat that's what he'd choose.

Martha decides to go with her instincts.

Spoiler

A - 30 (15)

Martha goes home with $1K.

A bit confusing. I thought

Spoiler

30

was correct. Did she

Spoiler

go with the ATE and pick C. 500?

tanstaafl2 wrote:A bit confusing. I thought

Spoiler

30

was correct. Did she

Spoiler

go with the ATE and pick C. 500?

Yeah, I was initially confused, but thought it was just me. Read the spoiler about the ATE dialogue.

Spoiler

She speculated that maybe the DJIA had something to do with the Fortune 500, and the Expert did not disabuse her of that notion, so (C - 500) was her guess. Which was wrong.

tanstaafl2 wrote:A bit confusing. I thought

Spoiler

30

was correct. Did she

Spoiler

go with the ATE and pick C. 500?

I've edited the Transcript post to clarify. --Bob

Nihil obstat®

BBTranscriptTeam wrote: Martha Muller
Louisville, KY
Currently unemployed

A fellow Loo-a-vullian. I have her first show recorded but haven't had time to go back and watch it.

BBTranscriptTeam wrote:The $16K Martha is about to go for couldn't have come at a better time. She's had to delay her career to take care of her mother. She's been looking for a job for about a year and has had lots of interviews but no success so far.

I hope elwing doesn't have that same problem when she gets back from Alaska.

BBTranscriptTeam wrote:$16K - Used to gauge the performance of the stock market, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average tracks how many companies?
A - 30
B - 150
C - 500
D - 1,200

Martha doesn't know, so she uses her ATE lifeline, stopping the clock with 20 seconds remaining.

ATE conversation

Jonathan says he knows more about the stock market now than he did a couple weeks ago. He reads the question and says, "This is difficult." He asks what Martha thinks; she says maybe it deals with the Fortune 500, so maybe the question isn't as difficult as she first thought. Jonathan says that he agrees with her and if he were in the Hot Seat that's what he'd choose.

Martha decides to go with her instincts, choosing

Spoiler

C. 500

.

Spoiler

A - 30 (15)

Martha goes home with $1K.

It's a shame. But then again, I recall when the news reports used to talk about the "Dow-Jones average of 30 industrial companies".

earendel wrote:... I recall when the news reports used to talk about the "Dow-Jones average of 30 industrial companies".

I still often hear radio and news announcers call it the "Dow Jones 30 Industrials". It also comes up in commentaries on how the Dow is a crappy market indicator precisely because it has such a limited basis. The claim is that the broader-based indices, like the S&P 500 or Russell 2000, are better indicators of the stock market as a whole.

what a shame, the Industrials index was to distinguish from separate indexes for Railroads and Utilities.

gsabc wrote:

earendel wrote:... I recall when the news reports used to talk about the "Dow-Jones average of 30 industrial companies".

I still often hear radio and news announcers call it the "Dow Jones 30 Industrials". It also comes up in commentaries on how the Dow is a crappy market indicator precisely because it has such a limited basis. The claim is that the broader-based indices, like the S&P 500 or Russell 2000, are better indicators of the stock market as a whole.

Not only that, but the index has no weighting to reflect the price of the stock or the value of the companies. The DJIA is determined by adding the raw prices of all 30 stocks, and dividing by a divisor, which is periodically adjusted to reflect stock splits and changes to the components of the index, which have happened many times. Here are the component 30 stocks of the DJIA, with today's closing prices:
http://money.cnn.com/data/dow30/

So the highest priced stock in the DJIA is IBM, at just under $100, and the lowest is GM, at under $2. If GM stock were go up in price by 100%, it would have less impact on the index than if IBM were to go up by 2%. So the DJIA is what it is, but it's not very representative of the overall stock market.

Common trivia question factoid -- the only original member of the DJIA that is still among today's 30 stocks is General Electric.