Just looking at the S&P 500 last week, you’d definitely question what investors have to complain about. The index hit another new high and has gone up more than 14 percent this year. Look at a lot of individual brokerage accounts and you can get a very different impression. Small caps have slid, banks have lost ground, homebuilders are struggling, and many perfectly respectable companies are well below their highs. Both things can be true.
That’s the market I think investors need to understand right now because the headline index is answering a different question than what many others are asking. The S&P 500 is a measure of how a basket of the top firms in America are doing. It doesn't tell you how the average stock is doing, and it certainly doesn't tell you how the typical investor's batch of stocks is doing.
