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Dow Jones Industrial Average

American stock market index / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), Dow Jones, or simply the Dow (/ˈd/), is a stock market index of 30 prominent companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States.

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Dow Jones Industrial Average
A historical graph. The Dow rises periodically through the decades with corrections along the way, from its record low of under 35 in the late 1890s to a high of around 36,000 in 2022.
Historical logarithmic graph of the DJIA from 1896 to 2018
FoundationFebruary 16, 1885; 138 years ago (1885-02-16) (as DJA)[1]
May 26, 1896 (1896-05-26) (as DJIA)[2]
OperatorS&P Dow Jones Indices
Exchanges
Trading symbol
  • ^DJI
  • $INDU
  • .DJI
  • DJIA
Constituents30
TypeLarge cap
Market capUS$10.9 trillion
(as of May 31, 2023)[3]
Weighting methodPrice-weighted index
Websiteus.spindices.com/indices/equity/dow-jones-industrial-average
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The DJIA is one of the oldest and most commonly followed equity indexes. Many professionals consider it to be an inadequate representation of the overall U.S. stock market compared to a broader market index such as the S&P 500. The DJIA includes only 30 large companies. It is price-weighted, unlike stock indices, which use market capitalization. Furthermore, the DJIA does not use a weighted arithmetic mean.[4][5][6][7]

The value of the index can also be calculated as the sum of the stock prices of the companies included in the index, divided by a factor, which is approximately 0.152 as of November 2021. The factor is changed whenever a constituent company undergoes a stock split so that the value of the index is unaffected by the stock split.

First calculated on May 26, 1896,[2] the index is the second-oldest among U.S. market indices, after the Dow Jones Transportation Average. It was created by Charles Dow, co-founder of both The Wall Street Journal and the Dow Jones & Company, and named after him and his business associate, statistician Edward Jones. The word "industrial" in the name of the index initially emphasized the heavy industry sector[dubious ], but over time stocks from many other types of companies have been added to the DJIA.

The index is maintained by S&P Dow Jones Indices, an entity majority-owned by S&P Global. Its components are selected by a committee. The ten components with the largest dividend yields are commonly referred to as the Dogs of the Dow. As with all stock prices, the prices of the constituent stocks and consequently the value of the index itself are affected by the performance of the respective companies as well as macroeconomic factors.

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Dow Jones Industrial Average 1970–2022