Dow Jones Industrial Average

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.

Components

As of May 29, 2025, the Dow Jones Industrial Average consists of the following companies, with a weighting as shown:

Former components

As of November 8, 2024, the components of the DJIA have changed 59 times since its beginning on May 26, 1896. General Electric had the longest presence on the index, beginning in the original index in 1896 and ending in 2018, but was dropped and re-added twice between 1898 and 1907. Changes to the index since 1991 are as follows:

Investment methods

Investing in the DJIA is possible via index funds as well as via derivatives such as option contracts and futures contracts.

Mutual and exchange-traded funds

Index funds, including mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETF) can replicate, before fees and expenses, the performance of the index by holding the same stocks as the index in the same proportions. An ETF that replicates the performance of the index is issued by State Street Corporation (NYSE Arca: DIA).

ProShares offers leveraged ETFs that attempt to produce three times the daily result of either investing in (NYSE Arca: UDOW) or shorting (NYSE Arca: SDOW) the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Futures contracts

In the derivatives market, the CME Group through its subsidiaries the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), issues Futures Contracts; the E-mini Dow ($5) Futures (YM), which track the average and trade on their exchange floors respectively. Trading is typically carried out in an open outcry auction, or over an electronic network such as CME's Globex platform.

Options contracts

The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) issues option contracts on the Dow through the root symbol DJX. Options on various Dow-underlying ETFs are also available for trading.

Annual returns

The following table shows the annual development of the Dow Jones Index, which was calculated back to 1896.

History

Precursor

In 1884, Charles Dow composed his first stock average, which contained nine railroads and two industrial companies that appeared in the Customer's Afternoon Letter, a daily two-page financial news bulletin which was the precursor to The Wall Street Journal. On January 2, 1886, the number of stocks represented in what is now the Dow Jones Transportation Average dropped from 14 to 12, as the Central Pacific Railroad and Central Railroad of New Jersey were removed. Though comprising the same number of stocks, this index contained only one of the original twelve industrials that would eventually form Dow's most famous index.

Initial components

Dow calculated his first average purely of industrial stocks on May 26, 1896, creating what is now known as the Dow Jones Industrial Average. None of the original 12 industrials still remain part of the index.

• American Cotton Oil Company, a predecessor company to Hellmann's and Best Foods, now part of Unilever.
• American Sugar Refining Company, became Domino Sugar in 1900, now Domino Foods, Inc.
• American Tobacco Company, broken up in a 1911 antitrust action.
• Chicago Gas Company, bought by Peoples Gas Light in 1897, was an operating subsidiary of the now-defunct Integrys Energy Group until 2014.
• Distilling & Cattle Feeding Company, now Millennium Chemicals, formerly a division of LyondellBasell.
• General Electric, still in operation, removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2018.
• Laclede Gas Company, still in operation as Spire Inc, removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1899.
• National Lead Company, now NL Industries, removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1916.
• North American Company, an electric utility holding company, broken up by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1946.
• Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company in Birmingham, Alabama, bought by U.S. Steel in 1907; U.S. Steel was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1991.
• United States Leather Company, dissolved in 1952.
• United States Rubber Company, changed its name to Uniroyal in 1961, merged with private Goodrich Corporation in 1986, tire business bought by Michelin in 1990. The remainder of Goodrich remained independent until it was acquired by United Technologies in 2012 and became a part of UTC Aerospace Systems, now Collins Aerospace, a Raytheon Technologies subsidiary.

Early years

When it was first published in the mid-1880s, the index stood at a level of 62.76. It reached a peak of 78.38 during the summer of 1890, but reached its all-time low of 28.48 in the summer of 1896 during the Panic of 1896. Many of the biggest percentage price moves in the Dow occurred early in its history, as the nascent industrial economy matured. In the 1900s, the Dow halted its momentum as it worked its way through two financial crises: the Panic of 1901 and the Panic of 1907. The Dow remained stuck in a range between 53 and 103 until late 1914. The negativity surrounding the 1906 San Francisco earthquake did little to improve the economic climate; the index broke 100 for the first time in 1906.

At the start of the 1910s, the Panic of 1910–1911 stifled economic growth. On July 30, 1914, as the average stood at a level of 71.42, a decision was made to close the New York Stock Exchange, and suspend trading for a span of four and a half months. Some historians believe the exchange was closed because of a concern that markets would plunge as a result of panic over the onset of World War I. An alternative explanation is that the United States Secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, closed the exchange to conserve the U.S. gold stock in order to launch the Federal Reserve System later that year, with enough gold to keep the United States on par with the gold standard. When the markets reopened on December 12, 1914, the index closed at 74.56, a gain of 4.4%. This is frequently reported as a large drop, due to using a later redefinition. Reports from the time say that the day was positive. Following World War I, the United States experienced another economic downturn, the Post–World War I recession. The Dow's performance remained unchanged from the closing value of the previous decade, adding only 8.26%, from 99.05 at the beginning of 1910, to a level of 107.23 at the end of 1919.