Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA)
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), called the Dow for short, is a stock market index that tracks the performance of 30 large, publicly-owned companies trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the NASDAQ. The index was created by Charles Dow in 1896 and is one of the oldest and most widely followed stock market indices in the world. It originally started as 12 companies and was expanded to 30 in 1928. The Dow is used as a metric to quickly understand the overall health of the US stock market and to some extent the US economy, hence why the stocks in the Dow represent a cross section of different industries. To further add to confusion, the company Dow Inc. is part of the Dow, but when someone says "The Dow" the are referring to the DJIA. DJIA is price-weighted, so stocks with a higher value have a higher influence in moving the index up or down. The selection of a company to be part of the Dow is seen as a confirmation that the company is an important part of the US economy. Because so many funds follow the companies that make up the DJIA, when a new company is added or removed, it can cause heavy trading as investors may have to get in our out of their positions to match the companies part of this index.
January 2024 Current DJIA Stocks
- 3M
- American Express
- Amgen
- Apple
- Boeing
- Caterpillar
- Chevron
- Cisco Systems
- Coca-Cola
- Disney
- Dow Inc.
- Goldman Sachs
- The Home Depot
- Honeywell
- IBM
- Intel
- Johnson & Johnson
- JPMorgan Chase
- McDonald’s
- Merck
- Microsoft
- Nike
- Procter & Gamble
- Salesforce
- Travelers
- UnitedHealth Group
- Verizon Communications
- Visa
- Walgreens Boots Alliance
- Walmart