The Dow Jones Industrial Average, Dow Jones, or simply the Dow, is a stock market index of 30 prominent companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. The DJIA is one of the oldest and most commonly followed equity indices. It is price-weighted, unlike other common indexes such as the Nasdaq Composite or S&P 500, which use market capitalization. The primary pitfall of this approach is that a stock's price—not the size of the company—determine it's relative importance in the index. For example, as of March 2025, Goldman Sachs represented the largest component of the index with a market capitalization of ~$167B. In contrast, Apple's market capitalization was ~$3.3T at the time and it fell outside the top 10 components in the index. The DJIA also contains fewer stocks, which could exhibit higher risk; however, it could be less volatile when the market is rapidly rising or falling due to its components being well-established large-cap companies. 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 approximately 0.163 as of November 2024. Wikipedia