abbreviation

Is the stock market up or down? Is the bull run beginning or ending? It depends.

Today, let’s discuss two totally unrelated but interesting topics. The first one is broad and involves how stock market indicators work. The second is narrow but very important to older folks like me who are making “qualified charitable distributions” from their retirement benefits and need to make sure that a key number and a key abbreviation are entered properly on their 2018 federal tax returns.

Stocks first.

Is the bull market in its 11th year or just in its 11th week? Is the stock market up today or is it down today?

Normally, these are questions that are easy to answer. But these days, the right response is, “It depends.”

How so? Partly because of what I’ve taken to calling the bifurcated bull market. And partly because of the totally different ways that the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index are calculated.

Because of the convention that determines when bull markets are deemed to have begun and ended, the Dow and the S&P 500 have been in a bull market since March 9, 2009.

However, the bull market for the Wilshire 5000 total market index (which includes all U.S. stocks) and the Nasdaq composite index ended Christmas Eve, which is the day the new Wilshire and Nasdaq bull markets are deemed to have started.

Hello? How’s that possible? Watch.

On Dec. 24, the Wilshire and Nasdaq closed 20.7 percent and 23.6 percent, respectively, below their all-time highs, ending the bull run that had started on March 9, 2009. A bull market, you see, is deemed to have ended on the first day that an indicator closes at least 20 percent below its high.

However, the S&P and Dow ended Dec. 24 down only 19.8 percent and 18.8 percent, respectively, from their highs. That meant they were still in a bull market.

Last month, according to numbers I got from Wilshire Associates, the Wilshire (on Feb. 22) and the Nasdaq (Feb. 15) first closed at least 20 percent above their Christmas Eve lows. That means both indicators are deemed to be in a bull market that had started on Dec. 24.

See? Isn’t it simple?

Now, to whether the market is up or down.

It depends on whether you’re talking about the Dow or the S&P. Usually, they’re reasonably in sync. But they weren’t on Monday and Tuesday, thanks to Boeing.

Boeing stock, a huge factor in the Dow but a minimal factor in the S&P, fell sharply on Monday and Tuesday because of its 737 Max 8, the type of aircraft that was involved in a plane crash in Ethi­o­pia this week.

The Dow is an average in which each one-point move of any of its 30 components counts the same — currently, about 6.78 points. The S&P, by contrast, is an index that’s computed by taking the market values of all its components.

Because Boeing has by far the highest stock price in the Dow, it has far more weight in the Dow (about 11.3 percent on March 8 and 10 percent at Tuesday’s close, according to Jeffrey DeMaso of Adviser Investments) than its 1 percent weight in the S&P.

On Monday, Boeing’s sharp decline cost the Dow 153 points, accounting for essentially the entire difference between the Dow’s 0.78 percent rise for the day and the S&P’s 1.46 percent increase.

On Tuesday, Boeing’s fall cost the Dow 166 points — more than the Dow’s whole 96-point drop. Had Boeing stock been unchanged Monday and Tuesday, rather than falling by a sum of 47 points, the Dow would have risen by very close to the same percentage as the S&P.

This, by the way, is an example of why the S&P has trillions of dollars of investments indexed to it and the Dow has great mindshare but little market share.

Now, to tax forms.

Since the start of 2018, I’ve been talking about how people like me, who are older than 70 ½ years and drawing required minimum distributions from retirement accounts, ought to consider making charitable contributions via “qualified charitable distributions” from their retirement accounts rather than writing personal checks.

That’s because lots of blue state types — including my wife and me — are now taking the standard deduction on their federal returns because of the $10,000 cap on state and local taxes imposed by Donald Trump and his Republican accomplices in the 2017 tax bill (which no one should call “tax reform”).

By having retirement income diverted to charities, someone in my position can in effect deduct charitable contributions and still take the standard deduction.

However, the 1099-R forms that disclose retirement income to us and the Internal Revenue Service don’t include any mention of QCDs. To make sure you benefit from your QCDs, subtract them from the number on Line 4a in your return and put the QCD number on Line 4b, which shows federally taxable income.

If you use a tax preparer, make sure to tell him or her about your QCDs.

In addition, the IRS tells me that you (or your preparer) should write QCD on Line 4b so that the IRS knows why that number is smaller than the 4a number.

On that note: Happy stock watching, and may your tax filing be as painless as possible.

02

When ‘Captain Marvel’ Became a Target, the Rules Changed

One audience reviewer deemed the movie “a complete disaster.” Another was “tired of all this SJW nonsense,” using the abbreviation for “social justice warrior,” a pejorative term for progressives. Yet another groused that Brie Larson, the movie’s star, “says I shouldn’t see the movie anyway.”

“Captain Marvel” had not even been released yet — its opening day was a month away — but that did not stop negative remarks from piling up against the film and Ms. Larson.

Much as Facebook and Twitter have had to grapple with false stories aimed at inciting violence or disrupting elections, movie review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb are often besieged by users trying to manipulate a film’s box office success.

Despite the trolls’ concerted efforts, “Captain Marvel” slayed during its opening weekend, but not before Rotten Tomatoes, an influential site where a bad audience score can damage a film’s prospects, made major changes to its rules. Most critically, it eliminated prerelease audience reviews. It also stopped displaying the percentage of moviegoers who say they “want to see” a film in favor of using the raw number of people. And it removed the “not interested” button.

“We’re doing it to more accurately and authentically represent the voice of fans,” the site said, “while protecting our data and public forums from bad actors.”

The backlash against “Captain Marvel” resulted from a collision of two major forces. One was the popularity of websites that at their best democratize the reviewing of movies, restaurants and businesses and at their worst can be weaponized for score-settling or political grudges.

The other was the growing movement in Hollywood toward broader gender and racial representation in film roles, production jobs and the industry in general.

“Captain Marvel” is among the few superhero films to star a woman, but a bigger trigger factor for the film’s haters appeared to be Ms. Larson’s outspokenness about the lack of diversity in movies and news media coverage of films.

Before the film’s release, Ms. Larson told “Entertainment Tonight” that she had spoken with Marvel about making the film “a big feminist movie.” In another interview, she said that after noticing that most of her interviewers in the past had been white and male, she vowed to seek out more underrepresented journalists, including Keah Brown, who is black and disabled, and who profiled her for Marie Claire.

Ms. Larson, who won the best-actress Oscar in 2016 for her performance in “Room,” had previously lashed out against the homogeneity of professional film critics. “I do not need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work for him about ‘A Wrinkle in Time,’” she said during a speech last summer. “It wasn’t made for him.”

This all provided fodder to trolls, and weeks ahead of “Captain Marvel’s” release, the percentage of Rotten Tomatoes users who registered that they wanted to see it plummeted to 27 percent. On Feb. 25, Rotten Tomatoes implemented the changes, and the “want to see” score disappeared. Since the film’s nationwide release on Friday, the audience score has rebounded to a better-but-still-not-great 63 percent, the lowest for any movie in the Marvel franchise. For a while, the score had been below 60 percent, signified by a tipped-over bucket of popcorn, the symbol for a film that might be one to skip.

The “Tomatometer,” which analyzes the ratings from film critics, is at a “certified fresh” 79 percent, slightly below the average for Marvel movies. It is impossible to say whether the website’s changes helped the film, but it made $456 million during its opening weekend, trouncing projections.

A representative for Ms. Larson declined to comment, and publicists at Disney, which owns Marvel Studios, did not reply to emails Tuesday.

The film’s opponents also swarmed YouTube; video rants with titles like “Brie Larson is Ruining Marvel” often appeared at the top of searches for her name. But a day before the film’s release, a change in the search results pushed those videos beneath others from established sources like Jimmy Kimmel, “Today” and Wired.

A YouTube representative said the reason was an algorithm change made last summer that reclassifies trending search topics as news. The site, which is owned by Google, took the action as part of its effort to combat fictitious content and ensure that reliable information was highlighted.

“Captain Marvel” detractors also flocked to IMDb, though a representative from that site said no one was available to comment, and would only provide a link to the site’s ratings and comments policy, which states that users are not allowed to rate a film before its release.

The new Marvel movie is not the first film to come under attack for a perceived feminist or politically correct underpinning. The all-female remake of “Ghostbusters,” “Black Panther” and “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” which had a diverse cast, all found themselves in the cross hairs of armchair critics, some aligned with alt-right groups.

Some sites pushed back. Last year, Rotten Tomatoes said it would delete comments posted from members of the Facebook group “Down with Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and Its Fanboys” if they contained hate speech. The group had posted an event called “Give Black Panther a Rotten Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes.” Facebook then deactivated the group (it has since been revived by someone claiming to be anti-troll), which had also claimed responsibility for torpedoing audience scores for “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”

That a movie starring Ms. Larson spurred Rotten Tomatoes into taking a bolder step was no coincidence.

When Ms. Larson spoke out last summer against the dominance of white male critics, she cited findings by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which is run out of the University of Southern California and had singled out Rotten Tomatoes for having 3.5 men to every female critic reviewing the top films of 2017.

In her speech, Ms. Larson also revealed that the Sundance and Toronto film festivals had each pledged to set aside one-fifth of their press passes for use by diverse journalists, including women and people of color.

Two and a half months later, Rotten Tomatoes threw in with Ms. Larson’s cause, and revamped its criteria for critics, focusing more on individual qualifications than the brand and reach of a publication, to include hundreds of reviewers from underrepresented groups in its Tomatometer score (a representative said the change had been in development for over a year). It also pledged $100,000 to various film festivals working to diversify their press corps, in part by helping cover freelancers’ travel and lodging costs.

A representative for Rotten Tomatoes, Dana Benson, said the change to its audience score had been in the works for a while, but that the attacks on “Captain Marvel” prompted them to roll it out earlier than planned.

“We’re very dedicated to making criticism more inclusive,” Ms. Benson said. “All the thought and care that went into the Tomatometer, we are expanding that to the audience score.”

Rotten Tomatoes said future changes could include having “verified” reviewers, like the ones who post on Amazon after purchasing a product. Those could come from people who bought tickets through Fandango, the movie ticket website, which owns Rotten Tomatoes.

There was, not unexpectedly, a flip side to the attacks on “Captain Marvel” — people rushing to its defense, whether they had seen the movie or not.

“There are a large group of people that are only down-voting this movie because they somehow feel threatened by it,” wrote one fan on Rotten Tomatoes.

“Imagine being so insecure, you cry about a movie with a girl as the hero,” wrote another.

And over on IMDb, one wrote: “I do agree that this isn’t marvel’s best movie, but it was a fun and enjoyable ride. I’m sure director and co. were hyper aware of the backlash they were facing and some of the moments seemed like tongue-in-cheek middle fingers to all the hate.”

03

An abbreviation in need of brevity

My eyes glazed over as they lit upon the acronym “LGBTQI” (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex) in this otherwise riveting article. I have always thought that the word “queer” is pejorative, hence politically incorrect; and I have no idea what an “intersex” person might be.

But that is not my point. Acronyms are useful shorthand for designating entities with long names. As such, they themselves need to be kept short. Two or three letters, as in UK and USA, ought to be the norm. Four letters, as in “USSR” and “NCPO”, should be the maximum. 

Otherwise, the reader’s attention is diverted from the entity itself to the problem of figuring out the meanings of all the letters in its acronym. The NCPO would not be nearly as popular as it is today (I am striving for irony here) if it had assumed the name the junta really meant: the National Council for the Promotion and Maintenance of Peace, Order and the Utter Submission of the Downtrodden Masses Forever (NCPMPOUSDMF).

Thus also with the ungainly “LGBTQI”. Obviously its inventors were struggling to be inclusive. Alas, they left out people who might want to have sex with animals. They could have added “AL”, for Animal Lovers, which would have given us “LGBTQIAL”. But even this excludes those lonely souls who, bereft of companionship, are forced to practise the solitary art of masturbation (LGBTQIALM).

The solution lies not in adding more letters to an already-unwieldy acronym but in coining a neologism that includes everybody and everything. We have heterosexuals and homosexuals – so why not anysexuals? I commend this compact neologism to the dictators of political correctness. It would obviate the need for an acronym and could lead to many exciting future headlines (“Cockroach lovers demand acceptance by the anysexual community”). 

Yours for greater precision of language, 

Ye Olde Pedant