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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Calculating The Dow Jones Industrial Average 5 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • "Just taking a look at how it's calculated tells you one thing: the djia is a load of crap in terms of guaging how the country is really doing economically."

    How about the S&P 500 then?

    • Never paid attention to how they're calculated. I should.

      • Basically, 500 large cap stocks that a committee considers representative of overall industry. Much better than the DJIA.
  • When AIG was tanking, they replaced it with Kraft. Now, if you took out GM and replaced it with Family Dollar (FDO), you'd get a 200 point jump in the average (right now, at least). If you also replace Citigroup with Google, jumps to 11400. With just a few good replacements, the economy would be doing much better!! Just keep replacing bad companies with ones which are doing well. It's much cheaper than the "stimulus"!

    (yes, I know there is some way in choosing the companies... but most don't know what it i

    • Part of the reason it's so awful is that it doesn't take into account the size or actual market price of each. For example, raise one stock a dollar and lower another one a dollar and there's no net effect, even if one stock started at two dollars and the other one started at two hundred. Also, if one company is 20 times larger than another, a one dollar change in stock price is considered to have the same net impact for either. This is why many consider the DJIA to be a lousy index, but since it's the m

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