By Fred Robinson | Dec 05, 2024 Updated 05:09 a.m. ET
The stock market’s thousand-point mileposts are losing their significance
The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Wednesday finished above 45,000 for the first time, as it extended a 2024 rally that’s driven major benchmarks to a series of records.
The finish, however, also underscored the diminished significance of the stock market’s frequently celebrated 1,000-point milestones, as they represent successively less impressive percentage gains.
The 45,000 mark for the Dow is “not necessarily a psychologically important milestone but a barometer of some of the biggest stocks in the U.S. economy leading the broader market, as the rising tide does have a tendency to lift all boats,” said JJ Kinahan, chief executive officer of IG North America and president of Tastytrade, in an interview with MarketWatch last month.
The Dow DJIA finished with a gain of around 309 points, or 0.7%, to end near 45,014 on Wednesday, according to preliminary figures. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 SPX rose 0.6% and the Nasdaq Composite COMP jumped 1.3% to both close at records, as well.
The blue-chip Dow traded as high as 45,071.29 during the holiday-abbreviated Friday session, but ended the day shy of the 45,000 level.
Monday marked just 16 trading days since the Dow’s last 1,000-point milestone, according to Dow Jones Market Data. It’s the third-fastest move from one 1,000-point milestone to the next on record, representing a gain of just 2.2%. The fastest was the run between 25,000 and 26,000, which took eight trading days and represented a gain of 4%.
The Dow tracks the market performance of 30 U.S.-listed large-cap companies. Over the past century, the index has changed its components more than 50 times – most recently swapping Intel Corp. (INTC) for Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) as the latter cemented its position as the world’s most valuable company.
The weighting of technology stocks within the Dow has increased in recent decades, Kinahan observed. “In the 1990s, the stocks in the Dow were all about manufacturing and autos, but now it’s changed significantly to reflect the companies that are making the biggest difference in the economy.”
That’s why, as one of the oldest and most widely followed stock indexes in the world, the Dow’s crossing of every thousand-point milestone could generate enthusiasm on Wall Street.
But while hitting each 1,000-point milestone has been a big deal for the stock market, it no longer has the same impact given the diminishing percentage gains required to attain each successive target, noted Matt Stucky, chief portfolio manager of equities at Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management.
“The way to think about the change in the Dow is percentage gains, not levels,” Stucky told MarketWatch via phone. “Now, each additional big round number is less material because the percentages are less than what they were.”
Ever since the Dow surpassed the 40,000 threshold earlier this year, a 1,000-point increase in the index has represented less than a 3% gain, compared with around 5% in 2017 and 10% in the late 1990s, according to Dow Jones Market Data (see table below).
Investors obsessed with big, round numbers may want to widen their sights a bit – perhaps now reserving the celebrations for 5,000-point milestones. If so, Dow 50,000 is just a roughly 11% gain away.
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