Friday, April 11, 2008

How Now Dow Jones (Thank Goodness for Charlie Dow) (GE)

"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Four shots ripped into my groin, and I was off on the biggest adventure of my life..."

That's Max Shulman's opening sentence in Sleep Till Noon (from a line in the book: "Get rich boy. Then sleep till noon and screw 'em all")
Max also wrote the book for the '67-'68 play "How Now Dow Jones".

I was thinking about HNDJ when Dow Jones & Co. put Chevron into the DJIA. I'll put together a post on that next week, probably titled HNDJ II.

Today however, DJIA component GE has the spotlight.

Because of it's construction the $4.70 (12.79%) decline in GE is accounting for 38.26 of the 220 points that the DJIA is down.

If GE had the same $320 Billion market capitalization but only 1/10th the shares out, i.e. was trading at $320, the same 12.79% decline would be $47.00 and the contribution to the DJIA would be 383 Dow points and the Dow Jones Industrial Average would be down 565 points!
The DJIA divisor is 0.12283402 (so it's actually a multiplier).