Dow Jones Industrial Average

Mary Altaffer – AP

The Dow Jones Industrial Average(DJIA), often simply referred to as the “Dow Jones”, is one of the market average indices, which measures the price-weighted average of the 30 large publicly owned companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

The index, illustrating how big industrial companies are performing in general, was first found by Charles Dow, founder of Wall Street Journal, in 1896. A statistician named Edward Jones helped him along the way, which clarifies the name “Dow-Jones”. At first, it only included 12 companies, of which many do not exist today. The only original company which has saved its place in the list is the General Electric (See Historical components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average).