Welcome to the Money Tree Investing Podcast.

Stock market, wealth, personal finance, value stocks, invest in your life.

Welcome to this week's episode of the Money Tree Investing Podcast.

Today we are talking with Jim Pierce.

He is the director of portfolio strategy with investing daily.

Thank you for joining us today.

My pleasure.

Thank you, Miranda, for having me.

So we're going to talk a little bit about what is known as a two-tier market and what's

going on today in the stock market.

So go ahead, Jim, and why don't you give our listeners an idea of what a

two-tier market is? Sure. Well, as its name suggests, the two-tier market is a stock

market that consists of two very different groups of stocks. Prior to 2015, at least for the five

or six years prior to 2015, basically we had a rising stock market where the vast majority of stocks benefited.

But if you look at 2015, you can clearly see that the market has been flat.

The indexes, both the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial average, are

very close to flat for the year. However, that can be a little bit misleading because

indexes are averages. The S.P 500, of course, is the 500 largest cap stocks. Dow Jones Industrial

average is 30 stocks. So when people say the market is up or the market is down,

what they're really saying is that the average for that particular index is up or down.

So, for example, in the first quarter of this year, you had a very flat market, and yet you had

some stocks and sectors that perform quite well, and others to perform poorly. Long story short, the two-tier

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