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Check
Your Check Number
Even after the advent of plastic
money (credit cards), using checks for paying utility bills,
grocery, subscriptions etc., is inevitable. We all have at
least one checking account with a local/national Bank. After
opening a new checking account, the Bank issues (either free
or at a nominal fee) checkbooks. Have you noticed that the
new check-number starts not from 1 but from 101? Have you
ever wondered why so? Well, here are two reasons behind this:
Why new
Check numbers start from 101?
Financial Reason
Any banker will easily vouch
that 90% of all forged checks are drawn on accounts less than
barely 3 or 6 months old. So, lower the check-number, more
prone for suspicion it is. Many merchants outrightly used
to deny checks of lower check-numbers. So, consumers started
asking the Check-providers (whether it's the Bank itself or
private third party providers) to supply checks bearing higher
numbers. After all, in US, check number is just a reference
for the consumer, the Bank and payment-receiving party are
concerned only about the "Routing Number" of the
Bank and "Account Number" of the consumer. That
way, consumer has the freedom of choosing his own number for
checks. Instead of making any arbitrary number as the starting
of check-number sequence, most Banks today follow the procedure
of issuing checks for new checking accounts starting with
the number 101. Anyway, forgery/fraud can still happen. This
is not fool-proof remedy for it.
Technical Reason
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When
checks are printed, the first sheet through is at the
bottom of the hopper (paper stack at the printing machine
assembly) and the last sheet through is at the top.
This necessitates backward-functioning (countdown) numbering
machines, which are set to start at the ending number
and finish with the starting number. The order of checks
can then be completed and shipped in proper numerical
sequence ready for use by the customer.
As the
order is printed, and the numbers recede, they would
read say 117, 116,...,102,101,100,099,098, etc. unless
the press is stopped and the superfluous zero is manually
depressed after 100 so that 99 is printed instead of
099.
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Again, at the point of 13,12,11,10,09,
the press would have to be stopped again to eliminate the
second superfluous zero. By encouraging the use of starting
check orders with 101, the printer has saved the need to stop
the press twice. This is a saving in time and efficiency,
not to mention money!
Dow
Jones Basics
The Dow Jones Industrial Average
(DOW) is an index of the average closing prices of thirty
blue-chip stocks. There are more than 6,700 stocks in the
market, but the DOW, with its thirty stocks, is used to gauge
and forecast the health of the economy.
How does
the Dow work?
It began simply enough in 1884,
when financial journalist Charles Henrry Dow devised a way to
help his readers track the fluctuations in the market. He chose
eleven stocks - mostly railroads - and added up the closing
price of one share of each company's stock. Then he divided
by 11 to come up with an average. In 1928 Dow added another
nineteen industrial companies to the list. The editors of the
Wall Street Journal (which is owned by Dow Jones & Co.)
substitute new companies for the originals only if a business
changes drastically, merges, or goes bankrupt. That's happened
just seventeen times in the past seventy four years. Following
are the constituent companies of Dow Jones Industrial Average
as of now.
AT&T Corp.,
Allied-Signal Inc., Alcoa Inc., American Express Co., Boeing
Co., Caterpillar Inc., Citigroup Inc., Coca Cola Co., Walt
Disney Co., DuPont E I De Nemours & Co., Eastman Kodak
Co., Exxon Corp., General Electric Co., General Motors Corp.,
Hewlett Packard Co., Home Depot Inc., Intel Corp., International
Business Machines Corp., International Paper Co., Johnson
& Johnson, McDonald's Corp., Merck & Co. Inc., Microsoft
Corp., Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co., Morgan J.
P. & Co. Inc., Philip Morris Companies Inc., Procter &
Gamble Co., SBC Communications Inc., United Technologies Corp.
and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Other changes
in the financial landscape have affected the Dow, and some
experts question its worth as an accurate gauge of the market.
One complaint is that about 80 percent of the country's workforce
is employed by service industries, yet about 80 percent of
the Dow is made up of stocks for manufacturing, not service,
companies. That means the bulk of America's industry is underrepresented
by the Dow. Another problem lies in the Dow's size. Because
it contains only thirty stocks, a strong move by any of them
can skew the index. How? Because the Dow is based on the closing
price of a single share of a company's stock, not the market
value of the entire company. The result: Small companies with
high-priced shares can have a greater effect on the Dow's
average than huge companies with many more lower-priced shares
- even though the big company may be more profitable than
the small one.
For these reasons and more,
true financial professionals hardly use the Dow in research.
Yet they all continue to quote it. The Dow is ingrained in
Wall Street culture and is recognized and basically understood
by everybody in the field.
Significant
levels on the Dow in recent past:
| Date |
Dow Value |
Description |
| December 6, 1974 |
577 |
The last Bear Market bottom |
| July 12, 1976 |
1011 |
Highest point between
Jan '73 and Oct. '82 |
| August 12, 1982 |
776 |
The start of the "Reagan
Bull" |
| August 25, 1987 |
2722 |
The 1987 high |
| October 19, 1987 |
1738 |
The (508 point) crash
of 1987 |
| February 2, 1994 |
3975 |
The top of the post 1987
crash recovery |
| November 23, 1994 |
3674 |
The start of the Clinton
"super bull" |
| March 29, 1999 |
10006 |
The first Dow close above
10000 |
| January 14, 2000 |
11723 |
The all time high |
| March 17, 2000 |
10630 |
The biggest one day gain
(499 points) |
| March 20, 2001 |
9720 |
Dow closes below previous
year low - first time since 1982 |
| Sept 11-14, 2001 |
9605 |
Terrorist attack - Dow
closed for four days |
| Sept 17, 2000 |
8920 |
The biggest one day fall
(685 points) |
| Sept. 21, 2001 |
8235 |
Dow's second worst week
ever -14.26% |
| Dec 31, 2001 |
10021 |
Dow up 21.7% from Sept.
21 low but down 7.2% on the year |
| July 23, 2002 |
7702 |
Low close of break below
post 9/11 low. |
Links of Interest:
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