Talk:Dow Jones Industrial Average

message: Is that true? opinions are welcome...216.58.19.235 (talk) 06:00, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: No.  As the article says, the DJIA is the sum of the prices of thirty stocks divided by the DJIA divisor (currently ~0.132).  It doesn't necessarily say anything about the market capitalization of the thirty firms or go even further and state more about the market as a whole.DavidRF (talk) 15:23, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed. Perhaps you are thinking of the Wilshire 5000 index, which does have a correspondence with the total market value, in the neighborhood of 1 billion dollars per point. See that article for details.  TomS TDotO (talk) 18:01, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  One dow point represent 1 billion dollars? 

message: Why does this graph use a non-linear scale? The scale is not required at all for the graph's data set and I find its subtleness a bit derailing when trying to look at the graph. Is it that it's financial data which is usually displayed on logarithmic scales and is therefore more quickly readable to people experienced with such things?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bishopgraeme (talk • contribs) 16:15, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Its usually rate of return that people are concerned with and constant rates are lines on a log plot. 100 points at 5000 is 2% while 100 points at 15000 is 0.67%.  It is true that all the ups and downs have effectively cancelled each other out since 2000.DavidRF (talk) 19:20, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  File:DJIA 2000s graph (log).svg 

message: One place in the article says it was one of the original 12 stocks, then goes on to list the other 11. But elsewhere, it says that none of the original 12 stocks are still in the DJIA, and GE was not added till 1907. Which is it?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.123.214.199 (talk) 02:45, 23 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  General Electric: Original component, or no?  

message: These graphs should have the Y axis start at the origin. Right now, they are very misleading.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.41.51.74 (talk) 04:33, 24 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: You've never seen a log plot before?  Its the only way you can represent over a century of data.  A constant rate of return shows up as a straight line on a log plot.  Using a linear scale, a constant rate of return becomes an exponential curve... it would be like nothing happened before 1980 (you wouldn't be able to see the Great Depression).  *That* would be misleading.DavidRF (talk) 04:40, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

text: The graph showing Black Monday is linear, and its y-axis starts at 17000. This is highly misleading, and as it is a linear plot, completely unnecessary. the 9/11 and 1990's graphs are also linear, and so should also start at 0.109.150.134.159 (talk) 08:55, 14 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Misleading Graphs 

message: According to the article the dow has been funded in 1896 but there is a image that shows historic dow-rates back to 1790. how is this possible? 80.108.113.34 (talk) 18:51, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Impossible image? 

message: General Electric has been in the Dow since its inception in 1896 but is not listed so in the table or in the article as a whole. Also, there's isn't any references for any of the dates these companies were added...so I don't know.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.28.169.105 (talk) 07:03, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Correct Dates in "Dates Added" 

message: I believe it is correct that DJIA does not include the components regular dividends (it does include splits and special dividends). Does anyone have an authoritative cite for this?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aviatorpilotman (talk • contribs) 16:18, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  DJIA does not include regular dividends 

message: I suggest that we discuss a bit about how to record the new highs being set for the DJI. I think that it is appropriate to have a permanent note of when the old high was passed, on March 5. Whether we have a permanent note of each successive new high, I am indifferent, but I think that we should pay attention to what this will look like for years in the future. Of course, we don't know what wobbles there will be, but we already know that March 5 is no longer an all-time high, nor is March 6, and it appears that March 7 is did not set an inter-day high. I don't have a good suggestion for the wording, but let's talk this over, rather than just making conflicting edits. TomS TDotO (talk) 14:34, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  How to handle new highs 

message: The reference states: "Retrieved March 14, 2010".  Is the current components listing up to date?  Compare to the page S&P/TSX Composite Index which is more current.
Mgouin (talk) 03:11, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Components 

message: How about including a criticism section on the DOW Jones Industrial Average about it not being a good economic indicator? NPR's Planet Money did Episode No. 443 criticizing it. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/03/12/174139347/episode-443-dont-believe-the-hype  and The New York Times has another http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/magazine/dow-jones-problems.html?_r=1 --F15 sanitizing eagle (talk) 04:11, 16 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criticism about the DOW 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Please remove extraneous information from the introduction and provide more clarification. Readers don't need to immediately know that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is also known as seven other names or acronyms, neither do we immediately need to know who owns the Dow Jones Industrial Average; or who owns the owner; or why it's called the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Please tell us, in the introduction, what the Dow Jones Industrial Average is; why and how it is used; the formula for calculating the average and an explanation of the components of the formula. As an example of needed clarification, the following text in the introduction confuses more than it clarifies; it uses the term "divisor" yet offers no explanation for "divisor". Of course a number is divided by a divisor; ALL numbers that are divided have been divided by a divisor, but what IS that divisor, specifically?
"The value of the Dow is not the actual average of the prices of its component stocks, but rather the sum of the component prices divided by a divisor, which changes whenever one of the component stocks has a stock split or stock dividend, so as to generate a consistent value for the index. Since the divisor is currently less than one, the value of the index is larger than the sum of the component prices."
In conclusion, the introduction needs extensive cleanup and clarification. I haven't read beyond the introduction as the experience was too exhausting to venture further.
Sincerely,
RDT
Rainydaytreat (talk) 01:08, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: You're right. Fixed. --Nemo 15:47, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please clean up the introduction. 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I'm new to Wikipedia. Offering a suggestion for this page. The most interesting thing I ever read about the DJIA is that it's 30 companies because when it was first published in the late 1800s, there were no computers. The writer wanted to come up with a quick way to tell the country how stocks did that day. Picking 30 large companies made for a do-able hand calculation that provided a good indication of that day's market performance. Of course, today we can instantly find out what the entire NYSE stock exchange has done for the day. Nonetheless, the DJIA is still the most quoted market number in the world. Why? likely because the Dow Jones company would like it that way, they publish the number, they own the WSJ (or did). But really it's kind of crazy we even report this number when there are much more accurate market performance metrics readily available. alantc57  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alantc57 (talk • contribs) 20:29, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Add explanation of why it's 30 companies 

message: The history sections for the past decades of 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s feel overly detailed. I'm recommending a cleanup where only newsworthy events are kept. We can probably remove about 50% of the info there on point gains and milestones that aren't newsworthy. Alternatively, we can list large milestones in bullet points so that they don't clog the flow of these sections. I'm slightly hesitant to remove too much info, so I'd like to discuss before cleanup.
Most of the information is already duplicated in these more-appropriate articles:
* Closing milestones of the Dow Jones Industrial Average
* Historical record closes of the Dow Jones Industrial Average
* List of largest daily changes in the Dow Jones Industrial Average
--HSukePup (talk) 15:51, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleaning up History section 

message: In the opening paragraphs of the article it is stated that the DJIA started its life on 26 May 1896:
This is repeated in the first sentence of the  section:
And in the first sentence of the  subsection:
And yet, the first sentence of the  subsection says that "the index" "was first published in the mid-1880s":
"The index" here can only be understood to refer to the DJIA, as the title of the article is "Dow Jones Industrial Average", resulting in a clearly erroneous statement that the DJIA "was first published in the mid-1880s". We should either remove these two sentences altogether, or make it clear that they refer to a different Dow average (not the DJIA). — UnladenSwallow (talk) 08:46, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  A mistake in the {{alink|Early years}} subsection 

message: What's meant by "currently" in this article? (E.g., it states "Since the divisor is currently around 0.1458,..." Is this automatically updated somehow?)  Surely "as of <date>" should be used in Wikipedia articles instead of "currently". How does a reader now when "currently" was written?
51.219.141.160 (talk) 15:08, 29 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Good point; I've tried to handle this here. — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 21:32, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Objection to "currently" 

message: How is it that with each companies price using a different factor that:
"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 currently (as of November 2021) approximately 0.152." DGerman (talk) 16:38, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Not sure what question you are asking? The DJIA index value is calculated by adding the stock prices for each of the 30 components together then dividing by the current DJIA divisor. Since the summation of the stock prices is well below the current index value of around 32,000 the divisor is well below 1 (currently 0.15172752595384). Hope that helps. Ksu6500 (talk) 19:14, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I thought you had to take MMM *2.88 + AXP * 3.56 + AMGN*4.88 ... DGerman (talk) 19:48, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: No. Read the Calculation section of the article. The percentages you are showing like 2.88% for 3M are only shown in the table to convey how much each component contributes to changes in the value of the index as of a certain date. Meaning the higher the weight the more a change to that component's stock price moves the index (since it is a price-weighted index). The weighting of each component is never used to calculate the value of the index. You can calculate the index value yourself by creating a stock list of the 30 components on Yahoo Finance (YF) then exporting that data to a spreadsheet. Summarize the prices of each component then divide by the divisor and this calculated value should match exactly to the DJIA (^DJI) price on YF. Ksu6500 (talk) 20:08, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  The value of the index can also be calculated ... 

message: This sentence is likely incorrect: "The word "industrial" in the name of the index initially emphasized the heavy industry sector, but over time stocks from many other types of companies have been added to the DJIA." 
No, I'm sorry but my understanding is that this is not correct. The word "industrial" used to be broader word and was a synonym of the modern words like "enterprise," "business" or "corporate," and comes from the Latin word industria, meaning diligence or purpose. Think industriousness, which is closer to that older meaning. For further discussion please see this paper. Thank you.  Not logged in 2 (talk) 01:14, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Industrial" is incorrect 

message: The divisor needs to be updated. There was a recent corporate action in MMM that affected it. 38.108.109.250 (talk) 14:24, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  DOW divisor