“The Dow Jones Industrial Average just became a little more hip,” Chuck Jaffe writes for MarketWatch. “It did not become more relevant.”
“In ditching the old flip phone (AT&T Inc.) for the iPhone (Apple Inc.), the index both modernizes its components and shows off why it is an outmoded, anachronistic measure of the stock market all at once,” Jaffe writes. “I have ripped on the Dow before, but this latest move pretty much confirms that the Dow is like People Magazine’s list of the most beautiful people compared to the front page of The Wall Street Journal.”
Jaffe writes, “The Dow is the celebrity number of the financial world, not the meaningful one.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, the Dow is largely meaningless, but it does offer a certain cachet, however irrelevant it may be.
Related articles:
The Dow welcomes Apple, the world’s most valuable company – March 19, 2015
Apple to join the Dow Jones Industrial Average – March 6, 2015
Inclusion in the DJIA is relevant to Apple as long as there are retail and institutional investors dedicating funds to index funds that track the DOW.
The only respect AAPL will ever get is from the people who retired on it, the ones who think different.
It matters. A lot.
The DJIA is the quickest indicator of where the big boys are going to go. If the DJIA moves a lot on a day’s news, that’s a quick indicator of what the big boys think about that news.
T should think why VZ is in and they are out.