The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), Dow Jones, or simply the Dow (), is a stock market index that measures the stock performance of 30 large companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. Although it is one of the most commonly followed equity indices, many consider the Dow to be an inadequate representation of the overall U.S. stock market compared to broader market indices such as the S&P 500 Index or Russell 3000 because it includes only 30 large cap companies, is not weighted by market capitalization, and does not use a weighted arithmetic mean.The value of the index is the sum of the stock prices of the companies included in the index, divided by a factor which is currently (as of September 2020) approximately 0.152. 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 the U.S. market indices (after the Dow Jones Transportation Average). It was created by Charles Dow, the editor of The Wall Street Journal and the co-founder of Dow Jones & Company, and named after him and his business associate, statistician Edward Jones. The word industrial in the name of the index no longer reflects its composition: several of the constituent companies operate in sectors of the economy other than heavy industry.
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. 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.