Dow Jones 65 Composite Average

The Dow Jones 65 Composite Average is an index comprised of 65 large public companies in the industrial, transportation and utility sectors. The Dow Jones 65 Composite, like the three sub-indexes, is price-weighted.

The Dow Jones 65 Composite Average consists of the 30 stocks that form the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), 20 stocks that make up the Dow Jones Transportation Average, and 15 stocks of the Dow Jones Utility Average.

All of the Dow Jones averages are price-weighted indexes. For this type of index, stocks with higher prices will influence the direction of the average more than lower prices, regardless of the actual size of the company. Most broad market indexes, by contrast, are weighted by market capitalization, such as the Nasdaq 100 Index and S&P 500 Index.

The combination of the Dow Jones Industrial, Transportation and Utility averages used to be a broad measure of the U.S. economy, as those sectors were once the lion's share of economic production. This is no longer the case, as industries such as technology, healthcare and finance now include some of the largest companies in the world. While the DJIA has, in recent years, included some modern companies in its "industrial" average (such as Microsoft, Apple and Intel), a majority of the Dow Jones 65 stocks are focused in old-line businesses, and therefore do not appear to represent a broad measure of economic performance.

Many of the 65 companies are household names. The following are some of the companies in each of the three sectors:

Industrial sector: Boeing, Caterpillar, Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson, United Technologies, Walt Disney

Transportation sector: American Airlines, Delta Airlines, Landstar System, Norfolk Southern, Southwest Airlines, United Parcel Service

Utility sector: America Electric Power, American Water Works, Centerpoint Energy, Dominion Resources, Edison International, NextEra Energy