The Dow Jones Industrial Average Reflects the Price of the Thirty Largest and Most Frequently Traded Stocks in the United States

Dow Jones

The Company

Dow Jones & Company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol DJ. It was founded in 1882 by Edward Davis Jones, Charles Henry Dow, and Charles Milford Bergstresser. Dow Jones is behind the leading financial publication in the United States, The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal was founded in 1889 and continues to be the standard that all other financial publications are measured against. The Journal has a circulation of approximately 2.1 million. Dow Jones employs an estimated 7,000 full-time employees and is known as a financial powerhouse.

Dow Jones Indexes

Dow Jones maintains and licenses more than 3,000 indexes and is hailed as one of the world’s most prominent stock indicators. Dow Jones has an overseas index counterpart to its Dow Jones Industrial Average in the form of the Dow Jones STOXX Indexes. The Dow Jones Indexes deal with a large selection of financial products such as exchange-traded funds, futures and options contracts, mutual funds, variable annuity and equity-indexed annuities, as well as structured products like OTC options, swaps, warrants, equity-linked notes and public/private debt. The methodology and data used by the indexes is open to public viewing for no charge. The indexes are distributed throughout the world via The Wall Street Journal, the Market Week section of the Barron’s publication, television, and radio.

What the Dow Is

Most people hear about the Dow through television or radio on a daily basis. The Dow is the average price of 30 of the largest and most often traded stocks in the United States. These 30 stocks are 3M, Alcoa, American Express, AT&T, Boeing, Caterpillar, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, E.I. DuPont de Nemours, Eastman Kodak, Exxon Mobil, General Electric, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, Home Depot, Honeywell, Intel, IBM, International Paper, J.P. Morgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald's, Merck & Co., Microsoft, Philip Morris, Procter & Gamble, SBC Communications, United Technologies, Wal-Mart, and Walt Disney. The industrial average is calculated by taking the number of stocks and dividing it by a divisor which takes into account stock mergers and splits by placing certain weights on all of the various stocks in order to come up with an accurate measure.

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