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Apple Is a Lagging Dow Indicator
I want to address the addition of Apple to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, so we have to get a few things out of the way up front. The venerable Dow isn't really all that important. It began life on May 26, 1896, but in the last 30 or so years, it has faded in significance. It remains deeply flawed in its methodology, driven rather arbitrarily by the price weightings of its constituents rather than their market values. You can see how this affects the weighting of each component in the index. Companies with higher stock prices such as Visa and Goldman Sachs have a 9.7 percent and 6.7 percent weight, respectively, ... (full story)