Neal Freiman

Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor.

My winner is the Dow Jones Industrial Index, which just hit 50,000 points for the first time in its 129-year history.

The big round number milestone came on Friday, when after being brutalized for much of the last week, the index popped off for 1,100 points, good for a mammoth 2.2% gain.

Reaching 50K would have been unthinkable to Charles Dow and Edward Jones, the two journalists who established a basket of 12 stocks in 1896.

No doubt they popped the champagne when the index doubled to 100 points in 1906, then expanded in 1928 to 30 stocks, the number it still holds today.

They probably still wouldn't have thought 50K was possible when the Great Recession hit in 2008, sending the Dow to below 6,600 points.

But thanks to a roaring American economy over the last two decades,

The Dow kept on rising and blasted through 40,000 for the first time in 2024, then sprinted like a Dutch speed skater to 50 in less than two years for its fastest 10,000-point jump ever.

Toby, among the three indexes, the Dow is the one you're most likely to tell, Grandpa, it's time to get you to bed.

But this milestone shows that despite the Dow's many flaws, it still remains a potent indicator of Wall Street's rise through wars, crises, and pandemics.

Yeah, let's talk about some of the names in the Dow.

I mean, the number one weighted stock in the Dow that's really propelled it recently is Goldman Sachs.

And then the second one is Caterpillar, which was our stock of the week on Friday.

That just hit a record high.

And what's the sixth most influential stock in the Dow, which is Sherwin-Williams, the paint company, a $90 billion company.

We're talking about real world stocks.

companies, then I think Sherwin-Williams is certainly one of the ones you have to point to.

You mentioned some of the criticism of the Dow, which is that it is weighted by share price and not by market cap.

And that is certainly true.

That's been one of the huge pushbacks against the Dow.