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Again, at the point of 13,12,11,10,09, the press would have to be stopped again to eliminate the second superfluous zero. By encouraging the use of starting check orders with 101, the printer has saved the need to stop the press twice. This is a saving in time and efficiency, not to mention money! The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DOW) is an index of the average closing prices of thirty blue-chip stocks. There are more than 6,700 stocks in the market, but the DOW, with its thirty stocks, is used to gauge and forecast the health of the economy. How does the Dow work? It began simply enough in 1884, when financial journalist Charles Henrry Dow devised a way to help his readers track the fluctuations in the market. He chose eleven stocks - mostly railroads - and added up the closing price of one share of each company's stock. Then he divided by 11 to come up with an average. In 1928 Dow added another nineteen industrial companies to the list. The editors of the Wall Street Journal (which is owned by Dow Jones & Co.) substitute new companies for the originals only if a business changes drastically, merges, or goes bankrupt. That's happened just seventeen times in the past seventy four years. Following are the constituent companies of Dow Jones Industrial Average as of now.AT&T Corp., Allied-Signal Inc., Alcoa Inc., American Express Co., Boeing Co., Caterpillar Inc., Citigroup Inc., Coca Cola Co., Walt Disney Co., DuPont E I De Nemours & Co., Eastman Kodak Co., Exxon Corp., General Electric Co., General Motors Corp., Hewlett Packard Co., Home Depot Inc., Intel Corp., International Business Machines Corp., International Paper Co., Johnson & Johnson, McDonald's Corp., Merck & Co. Inc., Microsoft Corp., Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co., Morgan J. P. & Co. Inc., Philip Morris Companies Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., SBC Communications Inc., United Technologies Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Other changes in the financial landscape have affected the Dow, and some experts question its worth as an accurate gauge of the market. One complaint is that about 80 percent of the country's workforce is employed by service industries, yet about 80 percent of the Dow is made up of stocks for manufacturing, not service, companies. That means the bulk of America's industry is underrepresented by the Dow. Another problem lies in the Dow's size. Because it contains only thirty stocks, a strong move by any of them can skew the index. How? Because the Dow is based on the closing price of a single share of a company's stock, not the market value of the entire company. The result: Small companies with high-priced shares can have a greater effect on the Dow's average than huge companies with many more lower-priced shares - even though the big company may be more profitable than the small one. For these reasons and more, true financial professionals hardly use the Dow in research. Yet they all continue to quote it. The Dow is ingrained in Wall Street culture and is recognized and basically understood by everybody in the field. Significant levels on the Dow in recent past:
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