Dow Jones
Dow Jones — NYSE / Nasdaq
Benchmark index tracking 30 companies listed on NYSE / Nasdaq.
About the Dow Jones
Dow Jones is the benchmark stock index of NYSE / Nasdaq, tracking 30 companies. It is price-weighted: each stock's weight depends on its share price, not the size of the company.
Characteristics
Price history
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Historical performance
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Calculated live from Yahoo Finance closing prices (unofficial public proxy) — may be temporarily unavailable or delayed.
Track Dow Jones in your portfolio
Add the Dow Jones (symbol ^DJI) to your virtual portfolio to track its allocation, performance and your simulated gains/losses alongside your other positions.
Add Dow Jones to my portfolioIndex composition
| # | Company | Ticker | Sector | Weight |
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No company found.
Approximate ranking by weight, for educational purposes — the index is weighted by share PRICE rather than market capitalization, so the most expensive stocks dominate regardless of a company's actual size. Official, up-to-date composition on spglobal.com/spdji.
What is the Dow Jones?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is the oldest still-published U.S. stock market index, created on May 26, 1896 by Charles Dow with just 12 industrial stocks. It now tracks 30 major American companies, selected by the editors of the Wall Street Journal to represent a broad cross-section of the economy, excluding transportation and utilities, which have their own dedicated Dow Jones indices.
How can you invest in the Dow Jones?
The most common route is an ETF tracking the index, such as the SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (DIA), or Dow futures for more experienced investors. Composition changes are rare — usually once or twice a year — unlike broader indices that are reviewed quarterly.
What makes its weighting method unusual?
Unlike the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq 100, the Dow Jones is weighted by share PRICE rather than market capitalization — a method it shares with Japan's Nikkei 225. As a result, a high-priced stock like Goldman Sachs carries more influence than a far larger company by market value but with a lower share price, such as Apple, whose influence has shrunk after several stock splits.
What are the risks and limitations of the Dow Jones?
With only 30 stocks, the Dow Jones is one of the least diversified major indices in the world — far less representative of the U.S. economy than the S&P 500. Its price-weighting rather than market-cap weighting creates distortions: a high-priced but modestly capitalized stock can carry more weight than the world's most valuable tech giant, which makes performance comparisons with other indices tricky.
How has the Dow Jones performed during past crises?
The October 19, 1987 crash ("Black Monday") remains the worst single session in its history by percentage: -22.6% in a single day, the largest one-day percentage drop ever recorded by the index. In 2008 the Dow lost about 34% for the year, with a session at -777 points (around -7%) on September 29 after Congress initially rejected the bank bailout plan — then the largest point drop in its history. In both cases, the index took several years to reclaim its highs, but it has always gone on to surpass them.
Price and chart data fetched live from Yahoo Finance via an unofficial public proxy: it may be delayed, temporarily unavailable or inaccurate. Composition and weightings are provided for educational purposes and are not a substitute for an official source. Nothing on this page constitutes investment advice.