November 3
HOW NOW DOW JONES DAY
The Dow Jones industrial average surged 43.41 points on this day in 1982, marking the greatest single day gain in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. (By today’s standards, fluctuations of several hundred points are not uncommon.)
Most of us are pretty happy to see any of the Dow Jones averages rise without ever giving any thought to how this financial gamble got started.
In 1896, Dow Jones & Company, a financial publishing firm, began to publish an average of the common stock prices of twelve industrial companies. It was simply a daily total of the prices of these stocks divided by 12. Over the years, this system of averaging has become a little more complicated - taking into account the distortion of averages caused by stock splitting, etc.
Computation was expanded to hourly averaging and to include 30 industrial firms. Then four different kinds of averages were included: the industrial; transportation averages (20 transportation companies); utility averages (15 utilities); and an overall average of all of the above.
That’s how it all got started. And now, for the latest Dow Jones averages...
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