Stock market indexes: Tracking Wall Street in real time and long term

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The Dow, S&P 500 and other indexes are weighted baskets of stocks.

© SEAN GLADWELL—Moment/Getty Images

Stock market indexes bundle hundreds or even thousands of stocks based on various parameters and compute their value into one number, helping you track Wall Street performance. So, when you hear “The Dow was up today,” someone was talking about the Dow Jones Industrial Average, one of the best-known indexes.

Although you often hear about “the Dow” or “the Nasdaq” on television, it might seem intimidating to pick up Wall Street lingo. But once you understand the concept of stock market indexes, it’s like having a handy scorecard telling you how Wall Street performed each day, or at any point in a given time period. And if you own mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the indexes can be a good comparison tool (i.e. “benchmarks”), showing whether you’re beating the broader market or falling behind.

But many new investors don’t try to outscore the indexes. They simply get their feet wet in the market through stock index investing, that is, putting money into a mutual fund or ETF that simply tracks one of the benchmark indexes. These are usually among the cheapest funds to own. Besides, most active fund managers underperform their benchmark indexes over time.

Imagine trying to learn about music by studying a list of every song, symphony, concerto, and other composition out there. Someone new to the subject would have no idea what separated all the titles. They might turn away, frustrated.

That’s why it’s helpful to have genres, like classical, jazz, rock, hip-hop, and blues. A stock market index does the same thing for stocks, with each index representing a kind of “genre” based on the characteristics of its stocks. It’s a very old idea, dating back to the late 19th century when Dow Jones & Company began compiling indexes.

Today’s major indexes that investors should know include:

There are many other stock market indexes, some of them offshoots of the ones just listed. For instance, the Dow Jones Transportation Average ($DJT) groups key airlines and trucking and shipping companies. The Nasdaq-100 (NDX) follows the top companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange. Russell offers an index that follows environmental, social, and governance (ESG) stocks—companies recognized for their dedication to socially responsible or sustainable policies.

There are also indexes for overseas stocks, including Europe, Japan, and emerging markets.

When the Dow Jones Industrial Average was created in the late 19th century, it was simple. The creators picked 12 stocks representing key industries such as agriculture, coal, oil, and steel. They added the prices of those 12 stocks each day and divided them by 12. The result was the average that the index tracked.

The DJIA remains a price-weighted index to this day, meaning it reflects the stock prices of its components, now numbering 30.

But the very nature of the DJIA makes it a bit of a relic—it gives the most weight to the stocks with the highest stock price, rather than those with the highest market capitalization. Modern indexes are weighted by the value of a company, so the companies with the most value (as measured by market capitalization) have the most impact.

Market capitalization is determined by multiplying the outstanding number of shares by the price of the stock. For example, here’s a look at one of the biggest stocks out there:

Of course, when an index covers hundreds or thousands of stocks, checking the index performance alone won’t tell you everything. On any given day, stocks move up or down for many reasons, and stocks in the same index often move in different directions. This can be caused by a news event, such as a company earnings report, or other news that could be positive for one company but not another.

Despite that, few investors have the time or energy to monitor every stock every day, so the indexes provide a great way to track the overall picture.

Over the last few decades, fund managers realized how easy these indexes make it to follow the market, and they came up with an idea. Why not let investors position their portfolios in line with the indexes themselves?

Many mutual funds and exchange-traded funds are now dedicated to mirroring the performance of major indexes. By purchasing shares of all the stocks in an index, at the proper weightings, a fund manager can closely replicate the results of that index.

Stock index investing is now a huge industry, with assets totaling about $15 trillion as of mid-2024. Its benefits include:

Index investing is also convenient if you want to mirror a particular segment of the market, such as small- or mid-caps, or you would like to focus on a specific sector of the economy.

Stock market indexes allow investors to track the market and its many segments. Exchange-traded funds that track these indexes allow investors to capture an index’s performance.

Index investing means your money will perform pretty much the same as the underlying index, although it isn’t always a perfect match. If you invest in a fund that tracks the S&P 500 and the market has a great year, so will you. The downside, of course, is that when there’s a bad year for the index you’re tracking, your fund will have just as bad a year.