The story missed the original purpose of the Dow with was a leading economic indicator... watch prices of the industrial giants to see broader market moves ahead of the market, at least optimistically. Not a terribly bad idea although info theory kicked in and once everyone knew and applied the theory the price results got baked into the cake of the prices themselves so it was no longer a money maker. That and changing the company mix from industrials to "big whos who mix of services and energy companies" pretty much eliminates the "industrial" part from the dow jones industrial average which makes it a useless leading indicator.<p>Another anecdote is in the 20s and 80s there was a lot of grown in mutual funds or I think the 20's term was stock cooperatives or whatever, the point is its "semi-unusual" for most equities to be owned by the equivalent of internet link aggregators, so other than index fund owners the dow doesn't really mean anything. My grandfather owned railroad stock, real railroad stock. Not a fund that owned a fund that owned 50 railroad stocks. You don't see that so much anymore. Diversification is good other than the immense parasitic load, which worsens at low return rates obviously... anyway investment has been abstracted away from the public, both by mutualization as per above and obviously by the destruction of the middle class (a stereotypical factory worker in 1970 probably owned some stock, at least in a retirement fund, but a stereotypical American of 2015 only gets minimum wage McJob or Walmart worker no benes no retirement savings at all therefore has little/no skin in the game anymore and no reason to care). So the public literally has no reason to care. Its not like they're going to startup and IPO and neither is their megacorp employer anytime soon. Equity markets are broken, don't matter much anymore. And with SOX compliance they suck for fund raising. We have a lot of capital sloshing around blowing bubbles and no legal way to apply it anymore.<p>Finally it was invented pre-central bank, and our equity prices now mostly represent central bank interest rates. Lower rates mean you get a lower return from riskless .gov bonds means equities need to return less, means in a constant dividend world, the price will explode once return rates around zero beat sticking the money in a mattress or .gov bonds. The PE ratio of our stock equities are controlled by the .gov centrally controlled interest rate, more or less, at least on a very long term. So obviously a multi-generational low in interest rates results in a multi-generational high in equity prices. How could it be otherwise? The market isn't going to tolerate a P/E ratio of "4" when the fed is only paying 0.25%, capital is going to flood into equities until you get a P/E ratio "similar" like maybe 100 or so.