Following Monday’s stock market plunge, when the Dow dropped almost 1,100 points in six minutes and finished down 588 points for the day, you might be asking yourself, what does all this mean to Kane County, IL?

The truthful answer to that question, from the viewpoint of the Kane County Connects newsletter editor is, “I don’t have a clue.” So I asked someone who does. Personally, I prefer forex trading as I have mt4 arbitrage software to assist me. However, I know a lot of you guys are very much into investing on the stock market, so I hope this answers and eases any concerns that you may have had.

Dr. Bob Froehlich is the chairman, CEO and primary owner of the Kane County Cougars minor league baseball team. He is also an expert on global financial markets, global economies, currencies and global demographic trend, named to three different All American Institutional Research Teams, written six books on investments and appeared on CNBC, Fox News, CNN and Bloomberg TV. He was one of the regular guest co-hosts for one of CNBC’s Squawk Box and The Kudlow Report, and a regular “special guest” on the Fox News weekend show, Bulls and Bears.

So he’s got a little more expertise than the average Jane or Joe, and you might be interested to know that, following the Monday meltdown, Dr. Bob isn’t selling.

“I am buying, bigtime,” Froehlich said in a brief telephone interview Tuesday morning. His overall advice was to “buy great companies that are on sale.”

Huh? Say again?

“(The stock market) is the only product there is that scares people when prices are low,” he said. “The stock market is on sale, and everyone runs the other way. It’s a unique psychology.”

Like a lot of other analysts, Froehlich is suggesting that what happened Monday is more likely a market adjustment than a crash.

An Associated Press story published in the Daily Herald said the Dow tumble was triggered by a number of factors — fears about the Chinese economy, plunging oil prices, disappointing profit reports and Federal Reserve rate jitters — but the fundamental reason might have been that a market correction was due after steady progress over the past six years. Froehlich’s assessment was similar.

“There are only two things I learned for certain in all my time on Wall Street,” he said. “The market never goes up forever, and it never goes down forever.

“I think two things happened in the market. First, we were in the latter stages of a tremendous run after what happened in 2008. The trajectory has been phenomenal. People who have been in the market understand it’s been good for a long time and it doesn’t go up forever. When markets hit all-time highs, there are pullbacks.

“Second, (yesterday’s drop) happened over a 10-minute period, and that was the China effect. China hiccups, and everyone overreacts. The truth is, no one has done a good job of understanding what China is. Anything that happens in China you have an overreaction. You have a lot of young (stock brokers) sitting in New York or Chicago and making a call on a country they’ve never seen. So it’s a combination of a natural pullback and the impact and complexity of analyzing China.”

Dr. Bob isn’t doing back flips and cartwheels about the U.S. economy, but he isn’t panicking, either.

“Our economy is OK, not great,” he said. “Jobs are recovering. Consumers are in much better shape today than in 2008. Businesses on the whole are in much better shape. Cash on the corporate balance sheet may be best in 25 years. Last time this happened (in 2008), it got ugly, but consumers were in trouble then. That’s not the case today.”

In the long run, there are some reasons for optimism, Froehlich said, and a few of those reasons were a little surprising — at least to one editor-without-a-financial-clue.

“We have a couple things that make us unique in the world,” Froehlich said. “We are the world’s leader in manufacturing.”

Froehlich said there are 181 countries whose economies are large enough to be measured, and the U.S. manufacturing industry alone would be ranked in something like 17th. We’re in the midst of an “energy renaissance,” he said, so I looked that up, too. Apparently, growth in U.S. oil production that has surged 50 percent since 2008, according to the Fiscal Times.

“There’s some really cool stuff going on there,” Froehlich said.

The U.S. also has the strongest currency in the world — another surprise to this pundit.

“Seventy percent of World Bank’s reserves are in dollars,” Froehlich said. “They know. They don’t love our politics, but they love our stocks and bonds.”

Froehlich emphasized that fun fact doesn’t mean the stock market is going to turn around tomorrow, but it does hint at some stability over time.

Finally, and just for fun, I asked Dr. Bob for his thoughts on the local economy.

“It’s tough to quantify,” he said, “and most of this is intuitive and suggestive. You drive down Kirk Road or Randall Road and you see which businesses are open, which are closed. You look around and ask yourself questions. Are the Kane County Cougars filling up their seats? Are there people coming into the area? From an intuitive, subjective perspective, it feels to me like the local economy’s OK. There seems to be enough economic activity. I think it could be doing better, but we’re holding our own.”

5 p.m. Tuesday Update: The stock market rallied Tuesday, but gains evaporated in the minutes before the closing bell, sending the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 200 points, according to an article in the Chicago Tribune.