Despite its media ubiquity and the fact it has survived all these years, the DJI is a weird index:
–it contains only 30 names out of the thousands of publicly traded companies
–although the index owners have tried to make it more relevant in recent years by adding Apple, Microsoft and Nike, it still by and large represents the big-cap names of America’s yesterday
–the weighting of a given name is a function of its per share stock price, not the size of the company. As a result, Microsoft counts less than Visa, despite being 3x V’s size. MSFT is about 1200% the size of IBM, but has only a third more weight (stock price of 150 vs 110). While the ease of calculation this brings might have been important in the pre-computer age, it’s an anachronism now
–because of all this, using the DJI is a convenient signal to the listener that a speaker knows very little about stocks. Odd that it should be used by media stock “experts” …or maybe not.
Pre-APPL, MSFT, NKE, the DJI did have one important use. When it started to outperform, that meant that a rally was near its end (and portfolio managers were buying the least interesting, but cheapest stocks) or that pms were seeking the safety of large, mature companies. The additions above have lessened that appeal.
However, in the current climate, the DJI is an interesting collection of coronavirus losers.
Year-to-date, as of the close on Monday, the Dow was down by 35%, the S&P 500 by 30%, NASDAQ by 24%. Since then, the DJI has been by far the best performer. Interestingly, the Russell 2000, which measures mid-cap US, was down by 40% on Monday and has bounced by about 8% since, tying it with the NASDAQ for smallest bounce.
Two days isn’t much to go on, but one read is the market thinks the bailout will mostly benefit the large old-guard industrials. A caveat: the 57% rise in Boeing over the past two days accounts for two percentage points of the DJI rise.