Dow 10,000: She Called It

After months of waiting, and guessing when it might happen, the Dow hit 10,000 at 1:21 p.m. today, for the first time in more than a year. Two weeks ago, we polled more than three dozen economic and investing professionals, asking for their predictions of the exact date and time when we’d cross this important psychological barrier — and one of them was only a couple of hours off.

Sheryl Garrett, a certified financial planner and the author of "Investing in an Uncertain Economy for Dummies," had told us we’d see 10,000 at 10 a.m. today. She does, in fact, own a crystal ball — she bought it from an antiques dealer who got it from a Yugoslavian fortune teller — but she says she didn’t use any otherworldly powers to make her prediction.

"There was a tiny bit of science to this guess," Garrett says. She says she thought the Dow could have hit 10,000 at any point within a few days of today, as fearful investors began to digest better-than-expected earnings reports.

Other investment professionals we polled were less optimistic. The average of all respondents’ guesses was December 7. Our readers were even more pessimistic — only 39% of participants in our online poll said they thought the Dow would hit 10,000 before December 7.

Garrett says she doesn’t think 10,000 is here to stay, however. "It’s not like it’s this magic threshold that once we get above it we’ll stay above it," she says. She says the emotional impact of the number is important, because "there’s a whole lot of psychology to the market, more than people would like to acknowledge."

Garrett says she used to keep her crystal ball on her desk while she met with clients, in part as a reminder that nobody can predict the future, "especially the very short-term future," she says. "I do think that we are beginning a recovery," she says. "I don’t think it’s going to be smooth sailing — I think we will continue to move forward positively, but it’s going to be choppy waters," she says.