The Dow Jones Industrial Average

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a stock market index of 30 large, publicly owned blue chip companies that are either on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ. When this started in 1896, people were just trying to work out like what kind of roads work? Do it's led good to have in your water or not? I feel like we were back in that stage. The other thing to note with the S&P 500 is that even though it is still used today, there aren't only 30 companies so it doesn't really reflect the entire stock market at once.