What does it mean for stock market prices to be like a random walk? What is a random walk? Financial economists have come up with an interesting scenario to introduce the random walk to laymen. Imagine if you will, they say, a drunk who has been left at a lamp post. The drunk wants to get home, but every step he takes is in a random direction. What emerges is a very erratic trail, where the position of the drunk over time starts drifting away from lamp post but occasionally coming back to where he started.

All year round the Federal Reserve makes adjustments to its lending rates to commercial banks, which in turn has an impact on the rates a commercial bank offers its customers. When the economy does poorly, for example during the bubble bursting of the dot com era and the 2007 real estate debacle, the Federal Reserve lowered the rates severely to stave off a recessionary economy. This was a positive state for companies and small businesses that need to borrow money to survive, but was a negative for people who were net savers.