The Yonder 40 Stock Index Keeps Falling — and What It All Means

editor — Sun, 5 Aug 2007 08:12:56 -0700

The Daily Yonder 40 dropped for a third week, which left the index of publicly traded stocks representing the economy of rural America down 7.5 percent since July 1. All the major indexes have declined since that time — but the DY40 has fared a bit worse than the others:

The Dow is down 1.7 percent since July 1.
The NASDAQ is off 3.5 percent.
The S&P 500 has dropped 4.7 percent.

The full listing of the DY40 is below. You can see that some stocks did well, even in a down market. Cabella’s reported higher earnings this past week and when some analysts upgraded the stock, the outdoor equipment store jumped by 12 percent in the week.

Mine Safety Appliances (which makes equipment for the underground mining industry) jumped over ten percent in the week after being upgraded. Sturm Luger also continued gaining ground even in a bad market.

Other DY40 companies struggled. The newspaper owner Lee Enterprises continued to decline with slow ad sales and was off ten percent for the week. The manufactured homebuilder Walter Industries was down more than 15 percent for the week.

There has been a continuing and quite interesting discussion about what the DY40 means. Please join in here. I would remind everyone here that the DY40 is not meant to be a good investment. It is meant simply to reflect the big business side of the rural economy.

The Rural War

adminPA — Mon, 21 May 2007 07:04:04 -0700

Austin,Tex. -- Which American communities pay the highest price for the war in Iraq? A look at the demographics of soldiers killed reveals that Iraq is not the war of any one race or region. Rather, it is rural America's war.

By Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing

The Yonder 40 Stock Index Keeps Falling — and What It All Means

The Rural War