A Capitalization-weighted Index: NASDAQ Composite Index

Computers became a lot more advanced during the 1950s and 1960s. By the early 1970s, people who worked on Wall Street started to experiment with computers to see if they could be used to improve stock trading.
 
At the time, there wasn’t a good way to get stock price information—or stock “quotes”—to all investors at the same time. This made buying and selling stocks inefficient and expensive. The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), an agency that oversees the buying and selling of stocks, decided that computers could be used to solve this problem.
 
The NASD created a brand-new stock exchange in 1971. This new stock exchange would allow investors to buy and sell stocks on computers that were connected to each other. They called this new stock market the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, or NASDAQ.

The NASDAQ stock exchange offered many advantages over other stock exchanges. Since all of the buying and selling was done on computers there was no need to have a physical trading floor. Accurate prices could also be viewed by all investors at the same time.
 
The inventors of the NASDAQ stock exchange also created an index that tracked the price movements of all the companies that were listed on the exchange. They called this new index the NASDAQ Composite Index. Today, there are more than 3,200 businesses that make up the NASDAQ Composite Index.
 
Like the S&P 500, the NASDAQ Composite Index is a capitalization-weighted index. This means that larger companies have a bigger influence over the movement of the NASDAQ Composite Index than smaller companies.

- Brian Feroldi, Why Does The Stock Market Go Up?:

Everything You Should Have Been Taught About Investing In School, But Weren't, 2022

A Capitalization-weighted Index: S&P 500

In 1923, the Standard Statistics Company created a new stock market index. Their goal was to compete with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was popular with investors. To stand out, Standard Statistics decided to use data on 233 companies instead of just 30 like the Dow Jones.
 
Years later, the Standard Statistics Company merged with Poor’s Publishing to create the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) company. In 1957, S&P made a few changes to its stock market index that would allow it to better compete with the Dow Jones.
 
First, S&P increased the number of companies that it tracked from 233 to 500.
Second, S&P let larger companies have more influence over the index’s movements than smaller companies. S&P judged the size of each business by using its market capitalization, which is the total dollar market value of a company’s equity. This is called a capitalization-weighted index.
 
On March 4, 1957, the S&P 500 was officially launched.
 
In 2021, large companies like Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) had market values that exceeded $1 trillion. That causes them to have much more influence over the index than smaller companies like Hanesbrands (NYSE:HBI) and Under Armour (NYSE:UA) which are worth less than $10 billion. This is why many investors like that the S&P 500 is a capitalization-weighted index.
 

- Brian Feroldi, Why Does The Stock Market Go Up?:

Everything You Should Have Been Taught About Investing In School, But Weren't, 2022

What is A Servant Leader

What is a servant leader? It is someone who, in Senske’s words, refuses to use people as means to an end—who always asks, “Am I building people up, or am I building myself up and merely using those around me?” 

A servant leader creates an atmosphere of “transparency” in which all relevant information is shared openly, so that everyone has an opportunity to make responsible decisions. Finally, a servant leader lets go of command-and-control methods, and creates a culture that allows everyone to grow into leaders, stretching their own God-given talents.

Dare to Confront

Every Christian needs to be equally convinced that biblical principles are true not only in some abstract sense but in the reality of our work, business, and personal lives. If we become aware that a ministry or business is violating biblical principles, we need to stop being enablers and start calling people to accountability—even if it means paying a price. An employee who takes a stand may not ultimately succeed in changing anything. In fact, he may run the risk of losing his job. The church’s task is to make sure that he does not bear that risk alone. As Lesslie Newbigin writes, fellow Christians should stand ready to support those who speak the truth to power and pay a price for it, even providing financial assistance to those whose moral courage costs them their livelihood.

We must never forget that going along with unbiblical practices is not only wrong, it is unloving. Acquiescing in an unjust situation typically stems not from love but from fear of possible negative repercussions. If we aspire to a godly, holy love for others, we must be willing to take the risk and practice loving confrontation.

- Nancy R. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, 2004.

Leadership vs. Management: It’s All About Intent

The leadership vs. management question is answered when we look at the intent behind both terms. When we take the lead, we are:

• At the front, showing the way.
• Doing new things – going to places where nobody has gone before.
• Making change, instead of keeping things the same.

When we manage, we:

• Make sure everything is under control.
• Want to see stability and reduced risk.
• Look at metrics to monitor and measure success.

Leading is about putting ourselves out there and carving a path. Management is more transactional, about stability, smooth operations and cutting out risk.

excerpt from: https://www.thoughtfulleader.com/leadership-vs-management/

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

What did Baconianism mean when applied to biblical interpretation? For Bacon, standing at the dawn of the scientific revolution, the main enemy had been Aristotelian philosophy. Thus he taught that science must start by clearing the decks—by liberating the mind from all metaphysical speculation, all received notions of truth, all the accumulated superstition of the ages. “With minds washed clean from opinions” (in his words)......

The method suffered from several serious weaknesses, which we need to grasp in order to understand how it continues to shape the way we read the Bible today. First, the very notion that Christians needed a “scientific” exegesis of Scripture represented a degree of cultural accommodation to the age. By embracing the most widely held scientific theory of their day—and even applying it to theology—evangelicals came close to losing the critical distance that Christians are called to have in every age. Moreover, the empiricist insistence that theology was a collection of “facts” led easily to a one-dimensional, flat-footed interpretation of Scripture.

Metaphorical, mystical, and symbolic meanings were downplayed in favor of the “plain” meaning of the text. And by treating Bible verses as isolated, discrete “facts,” the method often produced little more than proof-texting—pulling out individual verses and aligning them under a topical label, with little regard for literary or historical context, or for the larger organizing themes in Scripture.

Perhaps most serious, however, was the Baconian hostility to history—its rejection of the creeds and confessions that had been hammered out by the church over the course of centuries…… It means the church loses the wisdom of the luminous intellects that have appeared throughout church history—Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin. By adopting the Baconian method, many American evangelicals lost the intellectual riches of two millennia of theological reflection…… the idea that a single generation can reject wholesale all of Christian history and start over again is doomed to theological shallowness.

Old Books for New Perspectives

The very language and concepts in currency today—like Trinity or justification—were defined and developed over centuries of controversy and heresy fighting, and unless we know something of that history we don’t really know the meaning of the terms we are using,

Moreover, in our own age, with its keener sense of the historical context of knowledge, we recognize that it is unrealistic to think people are capable of approaching Scripture with minds swept clean, like blank slates…… They lose the critical distance afforded by checking their ideas against those of Christian scholars across a wide range of different cultures and historical periods. Instead of seeing farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, they are limited to what they are able to see from their own narrow perspective within a tiny slice of history.

That’s why C. S. Lewis urged Christians to read “old books,” not just contemporary ones. It is difficult not to be taken in by the prejudices of our own age, he wrote, unless we have access to another perspective—which is what old books provide. The great figures in church history are our brothers and sisters in the Lord, members of the Body of Christ extended across the ages, and we can learn much by honing our minds on the problems they wrestled with and the solutions they offered.

- Nancy R. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, 2004

Keeping the Bible in the Real World

Every biblical text is organically connected to the era of its writing. Whether looking back to the past, recording the present, or projecting into the future, every Bible passage or book is linguistically, historically, and culturally a product of its day.
 
Here is a hard-and-fast rule of interpreting any part of the Bible:
 

Never project present ideas onto ancient texts! Also, avoid superimposing later biblical ideas on earlier ones.

 
Remember, the time and culture of King David was a far cry from that of Abraham’s day, and Daniel’s epoch was a world away from King David’s. Not to mention the historical and cultural distance between Daniel and the apostle Paul! And beware when you hear it said, “Take the Bible literally.” What does that mean anyway? Literal is a slippery concept. Most often it winds up being what somebody thinks a biblical passage “literally” says “to them.” This approach is dangerous when we seek to interpret the Bible accurately.
 
The proper way to understand the Bible is authentically. As far as possible, this means seeing it in its original historical context. An authentic interpretation is one that respects an author’s language, culture, and history without superimposing elements that are foreign or anachronistic to the time of writing. While we may not be able to know every detail of an author’s historical setting, getting as much accurate information as possible will always enhance our understanding of the text. This is where a discipline like archaeology proves invaluable.
 
The worlds of the biblical characters were real worlds. Sights, sounds, and smells. Blood, guts, and grime. Cities, towns, and villages. Houses, temples, and palaces. Swords, spears, and arrows. Jars, bowls, and lamps. A significant portion of the Bible deals with the accoutrements and objects of material culture. Such things are accessible only by the trowels and brushes of archaeological excavations. While ancient history is pieced together mostly from written texts and inscriptions, the finer details and nuances of societies and cultures are best illuminated from the physical remains buried in the eroding sediments of past civilizations. Indeed, archaeology has a lot to say on the subject of biblical interpretation!
 

Two Extreme Views on Archaeology

Unfortunately, there are two extreme views on the subject of the Bible and archaeology.
 
On the far left are scholars who want the Bible eliminated from ancient Near East archaeology altogether. Archaeology should not be done with a biblical “agenda,” they say. They want archaeology for archaeology’s sake, without a biblical bias attached to it. For these so-called biblical minimalists, the Bible gets little or no voice in the pursuit of archaeology.
 
On the far right are those who think the exact opposite. They disallow archaeology a place in studying the Bible. Put more accurately, they reject any archaeological data that casts doubt on their own interpretation of the Bible. In their minds, because archaeology seems to contradict many of their traditional interpretations of the Bible, they would just as soon steer clear of both archaeology and ancient Near East scholarship. For them, archaeology has no right to speak to biblical interpretation.
 
 

- Steven Collins & Joseph M. Holden, The Harvest Handbook of Bible Lands: 

A Panoramic Survey of the History, Geography and Culture of the Scriptures, 2020.

 

Five Principles for Rightly Handling Scripture

God’s word is our most important and indisputable authority. This is not to say it is the only authority. R. C. Sproul notes that the Reformation notion of sola Scriptura does not mean the Bible is the only authority for the Christian, but that it is the only infallible authority—for the simple reason that God himself is infallible.

1. Scripture should speak to all of life
We should not see the Bible as a manual for how to escape this world, but rather as a book of wisdom for, in part, applying God’s revealed truth to all of life now. Scripture should be both the foundation and impetus for all our knowledge pursuits.
 
2. Scripture should define your paradigm
All of us tend to like the parts of Scripture that support our paradigms while we ignore or downplay the parts that threaten our status quo. But bad things happen when we start shaping Scripture around us rather than ourselves around Scripture. We must always be on guard against force-fitting Scripture into boxes of our liking.
 
3. Scripture is valuable as a whole, not just the parts
Context is everything in Bible study. The truth of any given verse becomes clearer when we see it in the larger context. We get the most out of the Bible when we read it in big chunks and grasp its grand narrative. The Bible is a cohesive narrative.
 
4. Scripture should spark worship and obedience
We must “be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22). Our lives should be beautifully transformed by the Bible because we obey what it says. Part of this is acknowledging that the Bible should engage not only our minds, but also our hearts, leading us to love the Lord and trust him more and more. We read the Bible to know its author, to behold the beauty and glory of Christ.
 
5. Scripture doesn’t have to make complete sense
This doesn’t mean we turn off our brains, throw up our hands, and tolerate theological fuzziness. Rather, the difficulties of Scripture should invite us to even more rigorous and precise examination, going deeper and wider in our study as lifelong learners, not because we have to know everything God knows, but because the more immersed we are in Scripture, the nearer we feel to his sweet presence.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021