What this site is
DowJonesToday is an independent publication with a narrow job: cover one index — the Dow Jones Industrial Average — better than general-purpose finance portals do. Instead of wire headlines and widgets, the site is built around a dataset: 8,727 trading days of daily closing values (1992–present), from which we compute everything you see — the daily briefing, historical rankings, records, milestones, seasonality tables, annual returns and component weights. When the market closes, the site rebuilds, every statistic updates, and yesterday's session takes its place in the historical tables automatically.
The site is independently owned and operated. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC, Dow Jones & Company, or any brokerage, fund company or financial institution. We don't sell financial products, we don't run affiliate promotions for brokers, and we don't give investment advice.
Methodology
Data sources
Daily open, high, low and closing values for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq Composite and the 30 Dow member stocks are retrieved from publicly accessible market-data feeds each day after the U.S. close. Our DJIA series begins January 2, 1992; statements about earlier events (the 1972 "Dow 1,000" close, Black Monday 1987) rely on widely documented public record and are labeled as such wherever they appear beside computed figures.
Computations
- Daily change and rankings. Change is measured close-to-close. "Today's move ranks in the Nth percentile" compares the session's absolute percentage change against every daily change in the dataset.
- Records. Largest gains/losses are ranked over the full dataset, by points and by percent separately. Streaks count consecutive sessions with a non-negative (up) or negative (down) close-to-close change.
- Milestones. A milestone is the first closing value at or above a 1,000-point level — intraday touches don't count, which is why our dates may differ from lists that use intraday highs.
- Seasonality. Monthly figures use month-end closes; the current, incomplete month is excluded from its own historical average. Weekday figures use all daily sessions.
- Annual returns. Calendar-year change of the final close versus the prior year's final close; intra-year drawdown is the deepest peak-to-trough decline in closing values within the year. All returns are price returns, excluding dividends.
- Index weights and the divisor. Component weight = share price ÷ sum of the 30 share prices. The divisor shown is implied (sum of prices ÷ index level), recomputed daily; it tracks the official published divisor to within rounding.
- Volatility and correlation. Volatility is the standard deviation of daily percentage changes, annualized by √252. Correlations use daily changes over the most recent 252 aligned sessions.
Update cadence and freshness
The entire site regenerates once per day after the U.S. market close; the "data through" date in the footer tells you exactly which session the statistics include. During market hours, the homepage quote additionally refreshes every few minutes. If the refresh is ever unavailable, the page simply shows the latest close — nothing on this site depends on a live connection to render.
Known limitations
Three limitations worth stating plainly. Our computed dataset begins in 1992, so "since 1992" qualifiers appear wherever they matter, and famous earlier extremes are reported as historical record rather than computed results. All return figures exclude dividends, which understates what an investor holding these stocks actually earned. And market data feeds occasionally restate a closing value; our daily rebuild picks up such corrections automatically, usually within a day.
Corrections
If you find an error — a number, a date, a historical claim — email feedback@dowjonestoday.net with a link to the page. Verified errors are corrected at the next daily rebuild, and material corrections are noted on the affected page.
Advertising
The site is supported by display advertising. Ads are served by third parties (see the privacy policy for details on cookies and personalization) and are never allowed to influence what the data says — every figure is computed by the pipeline described above, which has no idea the ads exist.
Not investment advice
Everything here is informational and educational. It is history and arithmetic, not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. Markets can and do behave unlike their past. See the full disclaimer.