Dow Jones Index

The Dow Jones Index is correctly names the Dow Jones Industrial Average and often abbreviated as DJIA. Its official symbol, however, is $INDU.

The Dow Jones Index is an index of the 30 large industrial stocks in the United States. The Dow Jones Index is unique among the popular indexes tracked in North America, Europe and Asia in that it is a simple average and not a weighted average like the others are. What this means is that the price of all the shares in the index are added together and then averaged to come to a figure which is then used to calculate the index value. Compare this to other popular indexes which are weighted averages. These other indexes weight the market capitalization of each constituent against the price when calculating their indexes.

Here are the Dow Jones Index constituents as at the beginning of 2012:

MMM 3M Co. AA Alcoa Inc. AXP American Express Co. T AT&T BAC Bank of America BA Boeing Co. CAT Caterpillar Inc. CVX Chevron CSCO Cisco Systems Inc. KO Coca-Cola Co. DD E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co. XOM Exxon Mobil GE General Electric Co. HPQ Hewlett-Packard HD Home Depot Inc. INTC Intel Corp. IBM International Business Machines Corp. JNJ Johnson & Johnson JPM JPMorgan Chase KFT Kraft Foods Inc. Cl A MCD McDonald's Corp. MRK Merck & Co. Inc. MSFT Microsoft Corp. PFE Pfizer Inc. PG Procter & Gamble Co. TRV Travelers Cos. UTX United Technologies Corp. VZ Verizon Communications WMT Wal-Mart Stores Inc. DIS Walt Disney Co.