page_title: Dow Jones Industrial Average
section_title: Precursor
hierarchical_section_title: Dow Jones Industrial Average / History / Precursor
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Monatliches Handelsvolumen des Dow Jones Industrial Average in Aktien von Dezember 1929 bis August 2012 English: Dow Jones Industrial Average monthly trading volume in shares from December 1929 to August 2012
context_page_description: The Dow Jones Industrial Average, 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 only includes 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 approximately 0.1458. 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. 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.
context_section_description: 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.
caption: DJIA monthly trading volume in shares from 1929 to 2012
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