The Dow Jones Industrial Average Stock Market Index

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is an index of 30 blue chip companies on the US Stock Market.

On Wall Street the Dow Jones Industrial Average is known as the “DOW” and it is one of several indices that attempt to represent what the US stock market it doing as a whole.

The Dow index was created in the nineteenth century by the Wall Street Journal editor and Dow Jones & Company co-founder Charles Dow.

Although the DOW is called an “Industrial Average” the DOW today has little to do with heavy industry.

The companies in the DOW are as follows:

3M (NYSE: MMM)
Alcoa (NYSE: AA)
Altria Group (NYSE: MO)
American Express (NYSE: AXP)
American International Group (NYSE: AIG)
AT&T (NYSE: T)
Boeing (NYSE: BA)
Caterpillar (NYSE: CAT)
Citigroup (NYSE: C)
Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO)
DuPont (NYSE: DD)
ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM)
General Electric (NYSE: GE)
General Motors (NYSE: GM)
Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ)
Home Depot (NYSE: HD)
Honeywell (NYSE: HON)
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC)
IBM (NYSE: IBM)
Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ)
JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM)
McDonald’s (NYSE: MCD)
Merck (NYSE: MRK)
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)
Pfizer (NYSE: PFE)
Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG)
United Technologies Corporation (NYSE: UTX)
Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ)
Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT)
Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS)

The DOW is the most popular of the US stock marker indices, primarily because of its size. Other popular stock market indicies include the NASDAQ and S&P 500.

You can view a quote of the Dow Jones Industrial Average here