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The past few days in the stock market have been so wilda plunge on Monday, a sharp pivot upward on Tuesday, a rise with lots of oscillations on Wednesdaythat a record set by the Dow Jones Industrial Average on last weeks final day of trading has been largely overlooked. Thats unfortunate, because theres a lot to be learned from that record about how financial markets work. Im referring to the record loss inflicted on the Dow last Thursday by the three-digit share price drop of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH), the large healthcare and insurance company. (Thursday was the last day of trading last week because the market was closed for Good Friday.) That price declinea whopping $130.93 a share, about a 22% dropcost the DJIA 805 points. Thats the biggest daily Dow decline ever caused by a single stock, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices. The DJIA dropped 527 points that day, with UnitedHealth responsible for the entire loss. Had UnitedHealth just stayed even, the Dow would have been up close to 300 points. How could a single stock inflict that much damage on the ever-popular Dow, the pioneering market metric that was created in 1896 by financial reporters Charles Dow and Edward Jones? Its because the DJIA is an average based on the share prices of its 30 component stocks. Unlike most stock market indexes, this one is not based on its components market values. So a dollar change in the share price of any Dow componentbe it UnitedHealth or Apple, which has about 15 times as many shares outstanding as UnitedHealth doeshas the same impact on the Dow as a change in any other component. The Dow Divisor, the market metric used to calculate the value of the DJIA, means that every dollar change in any one Dow component these days moves the DJIA about 6.15 points. Even with its huge drop last week, UnitedHealth is still the second-highest-priced stock in the Dow, behind only Goldman Sachs. So the DJIA is still vulnerable to another sickening day for UnitedHealth shareholders. Or, for optimists, a sharp UnitedHealth rise could set off a sharp Dow rise. The Dow is based on share prices because when Dow and Jones created it back in the day and it had only 12 stocks, the only metric available for them to use was share price. Companies market valueswhich are used to calculate modern metrics like the Standard & Poors 500 Index, the Nasdaq Composite, and the FT Wilshire 5000 Indexwerent available 129 years ago. The day before UnitedHealths sickening plunge last week, the companys weight in the Dow was 9.1%, but its weight in the S&P was only 1.2%, according to Silverblatt. By the end of the day Thursday, its weight had fallen to 7.3% of the Dow and 0.9% of the S&P. If you do the math, you’ll see that if you had $10,000 in a Dow index fund when the market opened last Thursday, UnitedHealthcares plunging price would have cost you about $207. By contrast, if you had $10,000 in an S&P 500 index fund, your UnitedHealth loss was about $27. Thats an example of why about $9 trillion was indexed to the S&P in 2023 (the most recent date for which data is available), according to S&P Dow Jones Indices, but only about $76 billion was indexed to the Dow. Please keep all of this in mind when people mistakenly refer to the DJIA asthe market. Sure, the Dow is a long-standing, venerable metric. But despite the massive exposure that Dow changes get each day, it is not the whole stock market. For that matter, neither is the S&P 500, which was launched in 1957 and is used by many investors and institutions as a performance benchmark. But as we can see from UnitedHealths disproportionate market impact on the DJIA relative to its S&P impact, the S&P measures a lot more of the market than the Dow does. Which makes it a far more useful and accurate metric. And that, as they say, is the bottom line.
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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Back in the housing frenzy of 2021, homeowners were bombarded with inquiries from eager investors looking to see if they were open to selling. The outreach came in all formstext messages, postcards, phone callsand often felt relentless. Redfin data shows that in Q4 2021, investors scooped up 94,715 U.S. homes, a 51% jump from the 62,581 homes they purchased in Q4 2019. But that investor-driven surgepowered by rock-bottom interest rates, pandemic stimulus, and the remote work boombegan to fade as the Federal Reserve pivoted to fighting inflation. Mortgage rates climbed from 3% to over 6% in 2022, putting pressure on capital markets. The higher borrowing costs squeezed a wide range of housing playersfrom small landlords and short-term rental operators to house flippers and big institutional buyersmaking it tougher to make the numbers work for new rental acquisitions. In Q4 2024, investors purchased 47,004 homesthats 50% below the level of investor purchases made in Q4 2021 (94,715) during the pandemic housing boom and 25% below pre-pandemic Q4 2019 (62,581). To better understand what rental property owners plan to do in the housing market over the next year, ResiClub partnered on a survey with Flock Homes, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz that provides services to help landlords transition their properties into a professionally managed pool while preserving tax advantages. The Flock HomesResiClub Real Estate Investor Survey was conducted between March 31 and April 7, 2025. It surveyed 245 real estate investors who own rental properties. Here are some of the big takeaways. (Note: Due to rounding, some totals will exceed 100%.) Housing market conditions The majority of housing investors aren’t focused on expanding right now. Of the U.S. real estate investors surveyed, 65% say they are focused on maintaining their portfolio size (56%) or exiting/selling it off (9%). Only 36% say they are focused on growing their portfolio. Among investors surveyed, 45% say that “purchase price relative to the market” has had the greatest impact on long-term performance when acquiring properties. Even so, 41% of U.S. real estate investors say their real estate investment returns are “far better” than what they believe they would have earned in the stock market, while 6% say their returns are “far worse.” Rising costs More than 20% of U.S. real estate investors surveyed say their home insurance costs have risen by more than 50% over the past five years. Maintenance costs are also a concern: 32% of U.S. real estate investors say “unexpected maintenance costs” are “the most underestimated risk in rental property investing,” followed by 26% who cite “tenant-related issues.” You can find the full results below: Methodology: Among the 245 real estate investors who participated in the ResiClub Real Estate Investor Survey, heres how many rental/investment properties they own: 1-4 units: 55.9% 5-19 units: 26.9% 20-99 units: 11.8% 100+ units: 5.3% Here’s how we grouped the regions by state in the survey: Midwest: IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, ND, NE, OH, SD, and WI Northeast: CT, DC, DE, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, and VT Southeast: AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, and WV Southwest: AZ, NM, OK, and TX West: AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, OR, UT, WA, and WY
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Every week, millions of Americans toss their recyclables into a single bin, trusting that their plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and cardboard boxes will be given a new life. But what really happens after the truck picks them up? Single-stream recycling makes participating in recycling easy, but behind the scenes, complex sorting systems and contamination mean a large percentage of that material never gets a second life. Reports in recent years have found 15% to 25% of all the materials picked up from recycle bins ends up in landfills instead. Plastics are among the biggest challenges. Only about 9% of the plastic generated in the U.S. actually gets recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Some plastic is incinerated to produce energy, but most of the rest ends up in landfills instead. So, what makes plastic recycling so difficult? As an engineer whose work focuses on reprocessing plastics, I have been exploring potential solutions. How does single-stream recycling work? In cities that use single-stream recycling, consumers put all of their recyclable materialspaper, cardboard, plastic, glass, and metalinto a single bin. Once collected, the mixed recyclables are taken to a materials recovery facility, where they are sorted. First, the mixed recyclables are shredded and crushed into smaller fragments, enabling more effective separation. The mixed fragments pass over rotating screens that remove cardboard and paper, allowing heavier materials, including plastics, metals and glass, to continue along the sorting line. Magnets are used to pick out ferrous metals, such as steel. A magnetic field that produces an electrical current with eddies sends nonferrous metals, such as aluminum, into a separate stream, leaving behind plastics and glass. The glass fragments are removed from the remaining mix using gravity or vibrating screens. That leaves plastics as the primary remaining material. While single-stream recycling is convenient, it has downsides. Contamination, such as food residue, plastic bags, and items that cant be recycled, can degrade the quality of the remaining material, making it more difficult to reuse. That lowers its value. Having to remove that contamination raises processing costs and can force recovery centers to reject entire batches. Which plastics typically cant be recycled? Each recycling program has rules for which items it will and wont take. You can check which items can and cannot be recycled for your specific program on your municipal page. Often, that means checking the recycling code stamped on the plastic next to the recycling icon. These are the toughest plastics to recycle and most likely to be excluded in your local recycling program: Symbol 3 Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, found in pipes, shower curtains and some food packaging. It may contain harmful additives such as phthalates and heavy metals. PVC also degrades easily, and melting can release toxic fumes during recycling, contaminating other materials and making it unsafe to process in standard recycling facilities. Symbol 4 Low-density polyethylene, or LDPE, is often used in plastic bags and shrink-wrap. Because its flexible and lightweight, its prone to getting tangled in sorting machinery at recycling plants. Symbol 6 Polystyrene, often used in foam cups, takeout containers and packing peanuts. Because its lightweight and brittle, its difficult to collect and process and easily contaminates recycling streams. Which plastics to include That leaves three plastics that can be recycled in many facilities: Symbol 1 Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, widely used in soda bottles. Symbol 2 High-density polyethylene, or HDPE, commonly used in milk jugs and laundry detergent bottles. Symbol 5 Polypropylene, PP, used in products such as pill bottles, yogurt cups, and plastic utensils. However, these arent accepted in some facilities for reasons Ill explain. Taking apart plastics, bead by bead Some plastics can be chemically recycled or ground up for reprocessing, but not all plastics play well together. Simple separation methods, such as placing ground-up plastics in water, can easily remove your soda bottle plastic (PET) from the mixture. The ground-up PET sinks in water due to the plastics density. However, HDPE, used in milk jugs, and PP, found in yogurt cups, both float, and they cant be recycled together. So, more advanced and expensive technology, such as infrared spectroscopy, is often required to separate those two materials. Once separated, the plastic from your soda bottle can be chemically recycled through a process called solvolysis. It works like this: Plastic materials are formed from polymers. A polymer is a molecule with many repeating units, called monomers. Picture a pearl necklace. The individual pearls are the repeating monomer units. The string that runs through the pearls is the chemical bond that joins the monomer units together. The entire necklace can then be thought of as a single molecule. During solvolysis, chemists break down that necklace by cutting the string holding the pearls together until they are individual pearls. Then, they string those pearls together again to create new necklaces. Other chemical recycling methods, such as pyrolysis and gasification, have drawn environmental and health concerns because the plastic is heated, which can release toxic fumes. But chemical recycling also holds the potential to reduce both plastic waste and the need for new plastics, while generating energy. The problem of yogurt cups and milk jugs The other two common types of recycled plasticsitems such as yogurt cups (PP) and milk jugs (HDPE)are like oil and water: Each can be recycled through reprocessing, but they dont mix. If polyethylene and polypropylene arent completely separated during recycling, the resulting mix can be brittle and generally unusable for creating new products. Chemists are working on solutions that could increase the quality of recycled plastics through mechanical reprocessing, typically done at separate facilities. One promising mechanical method for recycling mixed plastics is to incorporate a chemical called a compatibilizer. Compatibilizers contain the chemical structure of multiple different polymers in the same molecule. Its like how lecithin, commonly found in egg yolks, can help mix oil and water to make mayonnaisepart of the lecithin molecule is in the oil phase and part is in the water phase. In the case of yogurt cups and milk jugs, recently developed block copolymers are able to produce recycled plastic materials with the flexibility of polyethylene and the strength of polypropylene. Improving recycling Research like this can make recycled materials more versatile and valuable and move products closer to a goal of a circular economy without waste. However, improving recycling also requires better recycling habits. You can help the recycling process by taking a few minutes to wash off food waste, avoiding putting plastic bags in your recycling bin and, importantly, paying attention to what can and cannot be recycled in your area. Alex Jordan is an associate professor of plastics engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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