I’m old enough to remember when the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($DOWI) still mattered. And even though artificial intelligence and the S&P 500 Index ($SPX) steal the spotlight these days, I still think the Dow tells us something important. Namely, the degree to which anything else in the U.S. stock market has a shot of delivering profits for traders.
The Dow is best represented in ETF form by the SPDR Dow Jones Industrials ETF (DIA). State Street Investment Management runs it, and they made a great decision back in 1998, when five years after the first-ever ETF was launched to track the S&P 500 (SPY), they debuted DIA. It is a $41 billion ETF now. And it tracks the 30 stocks in the index that was created back in the 1800s, and which served as the home of the great stocks that were part of the U.S. industrial revolution. Not to mention the big business that helped the free world stay that way in World War II.
