I subscribe to a free financial news service that crowd sources user contributed articles. Admittedly a bunch of it is over my head, but I get regular updates that speculate what varies stocks or even markets will do. I find this informative to track what the investor types think of the corporation I work at.
Anyhow a couple days ago I get such an alert for a commercial real estate stock I have in my IRA. It's a big dividend paying equity. Think it's 10-13%.
What was interesting is that a bunch of people sold it on the same day the dividend was paid (ex-dividend date).
So within 24 hours it appeared to drop 1.5%, BUT if you factor in the dividend amount paid out, that offset more than .9% of that share price drop. So it lost only .55% which isn't a big deal for most people.
Things are not always equal for comparison, and assumptions lead to more assumptions and soon it's impossible to figure out what's really happening.