Dow Jones Industrial Average
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The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), Dow Jones, or simply the Dow (), is a stock market index of 30 prominent companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. The DJIA is one of the oldest and most commonly followed equity indices. It is price-weighted, unlike other common indices such as the Nasdaq Composite or S&P 500, which use market capitalization. The primary pitfall of this approach is that a stock's price—not the size of the company—determines its relative importance in the index. For example, as of March 2025, Goldman Sachs represented the largest component of the index with a market capitalization of ~$167B. In contrast, Apple's market capitalization was ~$3.3T at the time, but it fell outside the top 10 components in the index. The DJIA also contains fewer stocks than many other major indices, which could heighten risk due to stock concentration. However, some investors believe it could be less volatile when the market is rapidly rising or falling due to its components being well-established large-cap companies. 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 0.162 as of November 2025. 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, 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 The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones & Company, and named after him and his business associate, statistician Edward Jones. 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 that includes three representatives from S&P Dow Jones Indices and two representatives from the Wall Street Journal. 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.