Things Are Lookin’ Up: Easier to Get Rich than Ever Before

Based on research from The Stock Market Almanac, an Ohio State University study concluded that the stock market’s performance is consistently better by 25% on sunny days than on cloudy days. An Ohio State State professor speculated it might be because people feel more optimistic on sunny days. (Should you wish to speculate, the weather forecast for the week ahead might be more useful than The Wall Street Journal).

What we see happening on Wall Street, whatever we read and hear in the news media is colored by feelings as much as fact. Today’s news is just not an accurate representation of today’s economic facts, and savvy investors and entrepreneurs know it.

Some big, broad facts: more Americans own their own homes than ever before in U.S. history.

More Americans are investors, if only through 401K’s and IRA’s, than ever before in American history.

And if you aspire to wealth, America’s the place to be: there are just shy of 8-million millionaires in the entire world, but nearly 3-million of them are here in the U.S.A. But if you think the world’s not a fast-changing place, consider that, according to Forbes, the city with the most billionaires is New York (with 34) but the runner-up is Moscow (with 20).

We live in exciting, expansive times, with playing-field-leveling technologies born of the internet, making it easier than ever for the birdhouse builder in Topeka to do business with a gift shop in Geneva, Switzerland.

If you can’t get excited about these times we live in, what would get you excited?