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Catch up a little bit. There is a company called Standard and Poor.

They are one of the companies that rates things on the stock market. The most famous thing that they rate.

There's a company called Dow Jones that has an average of the industrial companies, which creates the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is a little strange because a lot of the companies are not industrial anymore that are part of that average.

It's an old-timey term.

But it comes from when America you know, when America was more

manufacturing driven than it is today. The S&P standard and poor rates the top, the largest,

500 companies that are publicly traded, meaning their stock is sold on what we call the big board, the New York Stock Exchange.

So these are the largest 500 companies that sell stock in America.

And that means that as this group of companies goes is a good indication of what the

economy is doing it's a good indication certainly of what the stock market is

doing because basically they make up the stock the vast majority of the stock

market so the top 500 companies on the New York stock exchanges called the S&P, Standard Poor S&P 500.

Now, that's important because that's actually a better way of measuring what the stock

market is doing than the Dow is, okay, or the Dow Jones Industrial Average or any other measure

for that matter.

This is a very generic measure, and people in the financial world use the S&P 500 as a

as a plumb line to tell what the market is doing.

So if a mutual fund, for instance, outperforms the S&P 500, that means the mutual fund is making

better returns than the market as a whole.

If it underperforms the S&P 500, it makes less returns.

So all that's important.

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