>It's worth considering the purpose of these indices as well. E.g. the Dow Jones is a price-weighted index for 30 large US stocks, taking into account splits and dividends.
>

I am well aware of the structure of the Dow, even to the point of it not being a performance index like DAX including dividends into the measure, and I am pretty certain you do your homework as well.

>A rise of 1000 in the index means it costs $1000 more to purchase that basket of shares than it cost yesterday, after taking into account dividends, splits etc. The market calls this a benchmark for the economy, which is the point: that for decades it's been accepted as an economic barometer with sustained increases representing growth and sustained declines representing the doldrums. It may be a truism that every $1000 rise in price is less in % terms, but what does that have to do with the averaging/smoothing purpose of the index?

Please show where my argument questioned averaging mechanism ;-)
Of course the index will be show less variance, but the percentage-underlying mechanism is averaged as well ;-)

Price changes of shares already in the market IMO mostly reflect future earnings / estimates of those. As reducing cost via eliminating workers needed to fulfil "current processing" clearly will not translate as "more jobs", the argument is questionable at least. Also not taking inflation in mental picture is one of the ways I see politics throwing sand at voters eyes ;-)

>By common acceptance, record high indices ought to be great economic news- unless you're determined to find fault. in which case mathematical nits suddenly get called into play as if they trump the market/social purpose of an index that is itself an averaging mechanism. ;-)

This nit tries to view such scales the same way/with similar scrutiny when deciding to invest smaller sums of own money and/or discuss orange-topped leaders here.

And yes, bowing automatically to common or expert wisdom is not my forte - I also realize that this trait kept me sometimes from investments which would have been smart.