Dow to Party

**Doug Pike** (0:01)
Remember when it was impossible to misplace the TV remote? Because you were the TV remote? Remember when music sounded like this?
Remember when social media was truly social?

**Doug Pike** (0:17)
Hey John, how's it going today?

**Doug Pike** (0:20)
Well, this show is all about you. This is 50 Plus with Doug Pike. Helpful information on your finances, good health, and what to do for fun.
50 Plus brought to you by the UT Health Houston Institute on Aging. Informed decisions for a healthier, happier life. And now 50 Plus with Doug Pike.

**Doug Pike** (0:46)
All right, welcome to 50 Plus on this Friday.
We had, on the way in, as the forecast is showing and promising. Bring it down a little bit.

**Brett** (0:59)
I can't hear myself think.

**Doug Pike** (1:02)
Thank you. Brett's in here. He had to take over for Will, who is, I'm not sure, Will planned this out. It's not unexpected that he was gonna be absent today. But anyway, Brett's in here, and he's helping out, and I know we'll get through, because he worked with me on my outdoor show a while back, what, like a year ago, Brett? Seems like it, yeah. It seemed like at least a year ago, holy cow. So anyway, depending on where you're standing and how long you'll be there, you may or may not need an umbrella in the next six or eight hours. I, when I left my home this morning, it was not raining at all.
When I got a quarter mile down the first street I turned onto out of the neighborhood, it started sprinkling.
And then it stopped, and it started, and stopped and started two more times before I got to the office. And just about an hour ago, maybe, we had a pretty significant little rainfall, but it only lasted for maybe five minutes. So technically, the forecasters got it right. It did rain. Oh, yes, it did. But it wouldn't have, it shouldn't have changed anybody's outdoor plans.
Unless you happen to be trying to go play golf at a place where they got an inch and a half of rain out of a heavy shower yesterday.
This is that time of year. And it's getting later. I've talked to enough fishermen about this and enough hunters that things in the outdoors tend to be happening a little bit later than they used to for some reason. The speckled trout in the surf, for example, wasn't until late May really that that kicked off when the temperatures got right. But it did kick off. And a lot of people have already done that. I'll be talking about that ad nauseum tomorrow on my outdoor show over on KBME.
In any event, lots of red on Wall Street this morning. All four indicators were down substantially in the case of the NASDAQ, by the way, which was down more than 2% when last I looked. It was a chunk. That's the most I've seen in a single day change. And it may come back by the afternoon, who knows. But that's the most I've seen in a single day change for as long as I've been watching the NASDAQ. Gold fell a few floors as well, but then so again did oil. So that's not the bad part. That NASDAQ thing, I'm not sure what drove it. Maybe the uncertainty and a few missed earnings marks recently in the chip industry. Dow likely dropped all it did this morning from algorithm driven profit taking after yesterday's 900 point rise. I'm not sure what moved the gold. That's a tough one to call. I need to make another call to Brad Schweiss over there at Houston Gold Exchange and figure that out. On the big plus side of economic news, employers added 172,000 jobs this past month, which was far, far ahead of expectation, by the way. They expected 105,000 new jobs. We turned 172,000 new jobs. And despite what a lot of you might hear or read elsewhere, the addition of so many new jobs is significant evidence that our economy is responding to all the new investments in our country since President Trump came into office.
How are we doing? We're going to abbreviate this first segment. I want to see where I am. Well, I got about two minutes left. That's my guess.

**Brett** (4:26)
That is correct, sir.

**Doug Pike** (4:28)
I'm getting better at this. So I have an internal clock, and I also have an idea how far down the page I need to get in some of my notes and whatnot before I'm going to hit three and five minutes and ten minutes and whatever.
Moving out of this segment, and before we move out of this segment, I'm going to go over a couple of things. I talked about it briefly yesterday. I end up at the end of every week on a Friday with all sorts of things piled up on my desk that I think are worthy of mention, but I just don't ever get around to them. And then about two or three weeks later, I just throw the whole pile out. And some of my little bits and pieces, I feel like, and I told Brett about one of them earlier, about AI about to take over one of the toughest jobs in the world, and that is debt collection.