It is common to discuss the stock market as though we were talking about one homogeneous market. In fact, many types of stock indexes have been created over the years in order to measure different market sectors. The Dow indexes are price-weighted which means that those companies with high prices tend to have greater weight in the Dow indexes than lower-priced stocks. The following pages depict the key Dow indexes showing the industrial, transportation and utility sectors.

Updated December 4, 2006