Why are big companies like Apple or Google not included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) index?
That is a pretty exclusive club and for the most part they are not interested in highly volatile companies like Apple and Google. Sure, IBM is part of the DJIA, but that is about as stalwart as you can get these days. The typical profile for a DJIA stock would be one that pays fairly predictable dividends, has been around since money was invented, and are not going anywhere unless the apocalypse really happens this year. In summary, DJIA is the boring reliable company index. Traditionally, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) was only comprised of stocks that were traded on the New York Stock exchange.  Neither Apple (AAPL) nor Google (GOOG) are traded on the New York Stock Exchange but instead are traded on NASDAQ.  All NASDAQ tickers are four characters long and all NYSE tickers are only three or less characters long (e.g. IBM or T (AT&T)). However in 1999, MSFT became the first NASDAQ stock to be included in the DJIA.  Given that AAPL now has the largest market capitalization of any company in U.S. history, I think it is likely if they retain that position, that they would eventually be let into the DOW club too, perhaps, ironically, even supplanting Microsoft. "In addition to the answers provided above, the weight the Dow uses to determine the index is not the market capitalization of the company involved. That means that companies like Google and Apple with very high share prices and no particular inclination to split could adversely effect the Dow, turning it into essentially the ""Apple and Google and then some other companies"" Industrial Average. The highest share price Dow company right now, IIRC, is IBM. Both Google and Apple would have three times the influence on the Index as IBM does now." "The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is a Price-weighted index.  That means that the index is calculated by adding up the prices of the constituent stocks and dividing by a constant, the ""Dow divisor"".  (The value of the Dow divisor is adjusted from time to time to maintain continuity when there are splits or changes in the roster.)  This has the curious effect of giving a member of the index influence proportional to its share price.  That is, if a stock costing $100 per share goes up by 1%, that will change the index by 10 times as much as if a stock costing $10 per share goes up by the same 1%. Now look at the price of Google.  It's currently trading at just a whisker under $700 per share.  Most of the other stocks in the index trade somewhere between $30 and $150, so if Google were included in the index it would contribute between 5 and 20 times the weight of any other stock in the index.  That means that relatively small blips in Google's price would completely dominate the index on any given day.  Until June of 2014, Apple was in the same boat, with its stock trading at about $700 per share.  At that time, Apple split its stock 7:1, and after that its stock price was a little under $100 per share.  So, post-split Apple might be a candidate to be included in the Dow the next time they change up the components of the index.  Since the Dow is fixed at 30 stocks, and since they try to keep a balance between different sectors, this probably wouldn't happen until they drop another technology company from the lineup for some reason.  (Correction: Apple is in the DJIA and has been for a little over a year now.  Mea culpa.) The Dow's price-weighting is unusual as stock indices go.  Most indices are weighted by market capitalization.  That means the influence of a single company is proportional to its total value.  This causes large companies like Apple to have a lot of influence on those indices, but since market capitalization isn't as arbitrary as stock price, most people see that as ok.  Also, notice that I said ""company"" and not ""stock"".  When a company has multiple classes of share (as Google does), market-cap-weighted indices include all of the share classes, while the Dow has no provision for such situations, which is another, albeit less important, reason why Google isn't in the Dow.  (Keep this in mind the next time someone offers you a bar bet on how many stocks are in the S&P 500.  The answer is (currently) 505!) Finally, you might be wondering why the Dow uses such an odd weighting in its calculations.  The answer is that the Dow averages go back to 1896, when Charles Dow used to calculate the averages by hand.  If your only tools are a pencil and paper, then a price-weighted index with only 30 stocks in it is a lot easier to calculate than a market-cap-weighted index with hundreds of constituents. About the Dow Jones Averages. Dow constituents and prices Apple's stock price chart. The split in 2014 is marked.  (Note that prices before the split are retroactively adjusted to show a continuous curve.)"
"The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company was established in 1902 as a private company.  It first raised public funds around 1903 but had a limited shareholder base.  By around 1929, it was reported as being tradeable as an OTC (over-the-counter) stock but it's likely that shares were traded well before this.  On 14 Jan 1946, the stock was listed on NYSE.  On 26 Sep 1962 it became a constituent of the the S&P 500 index.  On 9 Aug 1976 it became a constituent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In 2002, the company's name changed to 3M Co. It appears that the data on Crunchbase's ""IPO Date"" is wrong on this one. However, there are several companies that appear to do an ""IPO"" and have trading prices prior.  This is quite typical of early-stage biotech companies that trade OTC prior to a major exchange listing and ""IPO"". An example of an IPO happening after a company became publicly tradeable is NASDAQ:IMRN (Immuron). They had an ""IPO"" on Nasdaq on 9 Jun 2017, yet they had been trading as an OTC/Pink Sheet stock for months prior. They also have been listed in Australia since 30 Apr 1999. http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/activity.aspx?tab=pricings&month=2017-06 Another example is NASDAQ:GNTY (Guaranty Banchshares Inc) which had an ""IPO"" and NASDAQ listing in May 2017. This was a Nasdaq stock in 1998, went OTC/pink sheet stock in 2005. It has been paying regular dividends since that time. Clearly the word ""Initial"" is subjective!  http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/activity.aspx?tab=pricings&month=2017-05" try over in /r/personalfinance  Economics is about understanding the economy and how it works. Investing is about taking your money and putting it somewhere useful. They're related; but what you want probably isn't economy-wide advice, but specific individual options.  FYI, they'll recommend you get into some index fund to start; one that just tracks a big index like the Dow Jones, Nasdaq, or S&amp;P 500. These help diversify your risk and tend to offer good returns. But, a lot depends on what your personal situation entails, so head on over there and read their FAQ. This didn't answer his question. Also, while I agree with you that the Dow is meaningless (and your explanation why). In the investment industry, we don't only focus on the S&amp;P Index.. Many have a specific benchmark they aim to outperform that matches their investment strategy (i.e. Russell Mid Cap Value, Russell 3000, etc.). I agree with @Turukawa that the x-axes need to be the same to make a direct comparison.  However, the graphs you linked make me think of introductory calculus:  If you time averaged plots, speculative investments (gold, housing) seem to have many large concave up time periods and the dow jones has many concave down sections.  Using the concavity test: If the first derivative tells you about the rate of change, the second derivative tells you about the rate of change of rate of change.  Remember back to Physics 101:  1st derivative is velocity & second derivative is acceleration.   It would be interesting to have the same time scales for your plots & compare these accelerations between the two.  I suspect the more volatile investments would have larger (in magnitude) accelerations during boom/bust cycles than less speculative investments. Are you sure you're not just looking at prices that are adjusted for the split, e.g. Yahoo? For example, Gilead Sciences (GILD) split a few months ago, but if you look at a price chart, there isn't an interruption even though the split is clearly marked. (Look in the past six months; it split in January). However, you could also simply be watching companies that happen to not split, for a variety of reasons. This isn't a criticism, but rather just a consequence of whatever stocks you happen to be watching.  However, a quick search for information on stock splits yields a few articles (mainly from the Motley Fool) that argue that fewer companies are performing stock splits in recent years; the articles mainly talk about tech companies, and they make the argument that even though the shares in Google and Apple have a high stock price: Google and Apple aren't all that expensive by traditional valuation   metrics. Google trades at just 15 times next year's projected   profitability. Apple fetches a mere 13 times fiscal 2012's bottom-line estimates. These articles are a bit dated in terms of the stock prices, but the rationale is probably still good. Similar logic could apply for other companies; for example, since May 2009, Panera's stock price has climbed by almost a factor of 4 without splitting. The articles also make the point that stock splits were traditionally seen as bullish signs because: Companies splitting to bring their share prices back down to more   accessible levels were optimistic in building those sand castles back   up. One could make a fair argument that the overall economic climate isn't as bullish as it used to be, although I would only be convinced that this was affecting stock splits if data could be gathered and tested. A stock split can also raise the price of a stock because if small investors feel the stock is suddenly more accessible to them, they purchase more of it and might therefore drive up the price. (See the Investopedia article on stock splits for more information). Companies might not see the necessity in doing this because their stock price isn't high enough to warrant a split or because the price isn't high enough to outprice smaller investors.  One interesting point to make, however, is that even though stock splits can drive small investors to buy more of the stock, this isn't always a gain for the company because professional investors (firms, institutions, etc.) have a tendency to sell after a split. The paper is a bit old, but it's still a very neat read. It's possible that more and more companies no longer see any advantage to splitting because it might not affect their stock price in the long run, and arguably could even hurt it. Considering that large/professional investors likely hold a higher percentage of a company's shares than smaller investors, if a stock split triggers a wave of selling by the former, the increasing propensity to buy of the latter may not be enough to offset the decline in price.  Note: My answer only refers to standard stock splits; the reasons above may not apply to a decrease in the number of reverse stock splits (which may not be a phenomenon; I don't know). The reason for such differences is that there's no source to get this information. The companies do not (and cannot) report who are their shareholders except for large shareholders and stakes of interest. These, in the case of GoPro, were identified during the IPO (you can look the filings up on EDGAR). You can get information from this or that publicly traded mutual fund about their larger holdings from their reports, but private investors don't provide even that. Institutional (public) investors buy and sell shares all the time and only report large investments. So there's no reliable way to get a snapshot picture you're looking for. "Because Google recently decided that they will not provide Maps for free to partners who use the data, and Apple was the largest Maps user.   Cutting the Apple created Maps app that used Google data and forcing Google to release their own app basically means Google goes from cashing checks from Apple to having to create and support an app all on their own dime.  Also, do you want to guess why Apple Maps w/ Google data didn't have features like Turn by Turn Navigation? If you guessed ""Google didn't allow Apple to have it"", you guess right.   Apple had to do it not only to try and reach feature parity, but to prevent themselves from having to pay their biggest competitor to use Maps data." There are the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices. I believe the reports used to create them are released to the public. This could be a good place to start.