What Goes Up

There are many factors that affect the stock market. These are known to most everyone who has ever purchased a stock. If you watched Wall Street, even if you never invested anything but the price of the ticket to the movie, you learned that greed is good. Which seems to work counter-intuitively to the fact that fifty-two percent of Americans avoid the stock market.  How then, are all those folks going to experience the gravy train that our "President" wants us to enjoy as the stock market continues to flirt with unheard of highs? That seems to suggest that more than half of America is missing out on all that greed.
Yes, these are definitely the salad days if you're into that kind of thing. I can't say that I avoid the stock market, since I have a number of diversified bits and pieces of stock related investments that I pretend to understand but spend little or no time watching the Dow Jones ticker since my real life is impacted by my paycheck and not the pittance that I have deducted to play these financial games. Like that fifty-two percent, I tend to view this as made up money for which I have to take other people's word. This full time job I maintain tends to keep my full attention from being consumed by the stocks I may own.
So I decided to look it up. I wanted to find out why stocks go up. Money Instructor answered my search with a list of  four factors: Internal Events - releasing a new product or hiring a new CEO, External Events - interest rates go up or down, Market Pressure - a lot like peer pressure but with more dollar signs,  and Hype.
It was that last one that I read with great interest. "Such hype may take the form of positive reports in stock market newsletters, Internet chatter on bulletin boards, press releases and news reports." So if, for example, a "President" routinely jumped on hit Twitter account to blather on about how great the stock market was doing, that could be a contributing factor to making stock prices move higher, that would be "hype." And though Mother Jones wrote an article suggesting that "The Stock Market Is Doing Well Under Donald Trump," they made the point that the gains made in this "President's" first year are impressive, they lag behind those of his predecessor. This probably doesn't come as a shock to know this comes from a guy who likes to point out that his approval rating is forty-six percent. I'm not much of a math guy, but that's less than the number of Americans who don't trust the stock market.