I just love stories about big money, don’t you?

In Allen, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, the city fathers just built a $60 million, that’s $60,000,000, football stadium. The people of Allen voted for a $119 million bond issue, 63 percent in favor.

The median income in Allen is $95,000 a year. One half of the residents make over $95,000, and half make less. The $95,000 number is about twice the national average. So far so good right?

OK, the stadium is for Allen High School. The high school has 5,700 students and attendance at each game is about 18,000 fans.

They like their football in Texas.

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As we move into September the market just keeps making the naysayers look silly.

As I write this on Sept. 11 the broad stock market in the United States is up about 15 percent as measured by the Wilshire 5000 index of most stocks traded. The S&P 500 stock index is in an interesting area, 1,400. This has been sort of a stopping point with resistance.

If the market moves above this area, some people think around 1,435, the exact number depends on which technician you talk to, then according to these guys, we could be off to the races.

What happens sometimes is that people watch the technical aspect of the market, and when it does certain things on the upside, new money comes piling in.

Same thing happens sometimes when it goes down except money already in the market comes out.

Who knows what is going to happen? Could be fun to watch.

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On Sept. 6 the market was roaring ahead about 2 percent. Are you sitting down? The move was fueled due to good news out of Europe.

As you know, normally we are getting smashed because of bad news out of Europe.

You know short term we were probably helped by Hurricane Isaac. By helped I mean not hurt.

It appears that damage will be around $2 billion. While $2 billion is not a small number, Katrina’s damage was around $40 billion.

The news media/weather talking heads wanted you to believe that a catastrophe was coming. They need viewers, as you know.

The fact that it was not $40 billion in damage helps us not to set our economy back even more and hopefully allows the recovery to continue.

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I just love this kind of stuff. Two years ago the headline in the business section of USA Today said “Shell shocked investors quit the market.”

In the two years since then, the Standard and Poor’s 500 stock index has gained 38 percent.

I also read that from 2009 data, the top 5 percent of income earners in the United States paid 59 percent of all the federal income taxes. I also read that about 45 percent of our population, that’s 45 percent, pays no federal income taxes. They may pay Social Security but not income tax.

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It has been four years, hard to believe, since Lehman Brothers failed because our government would not rescue it. We seemed to rescue everyone else.

I still maintain, my opinion of course, that if Lehman had not failed, we would not have gone through what we have been going through. The one rescue we needed to make, we did not.

Personally I was no fan of Lehman, but I still think it should have been rescued.

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The election is just days away, thank goodness. Get ready for a month and a half media and commercial barrage.

I have come to actually hate the commercials. Special interest groups, unions, pacs, everybody gets in the act and it seems like nobody tells the truth.

I think I’ll go trekking the Himalayas until it’s over.

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On a personal note, Madolyn Pentony, Maddy to my wife and Maddog to me, told us last week that it was time for her to be moving along.

You may remember my writing about Maddog attending the Mensa meetings with me. She was my wife’s constant companion for over 16 years. She was a 40-pound Blue Merle Australian Herder and Cocker.

She was with us almost as long as Janey and I have been married. It was the hardest thing we have ever done.

She was a member of our family and we miss her terribly, but we look forward to seeing her again one of these days.

We figure she’ll wait on us.

Howie Pentony is a Saxonburg client portfolio manager.