Please stop worrying about the Dow. You’re not invested in it.

For more than 122 years, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been viewed as America’s leading stock market index. Retail investors sitting in front of their computers to seasoned Wall Street veterans rely on the Dow to provide a glimpse of the health of the U.S. economy and the strength of its stock market. The Dow is not a modern index. It is old and simple, created more than a century ago by Charles Dow, who co-founded Dow Jones and was the first editor of The Wall Street Journal. For many, this index is synonymous with the American stock market. Today, when someone says, “How did the market do today?” they’re probably asking about the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But the Dow is hardly a reflection of the stock market as a whole. It was useful to follow Charles Dow’s index before we had computers to calculate market movements, but no one would build a stock market index that way anymore. Professionals in the asset management industry don’t use the Dow as a benchmark because they understand its weaknesses. There are many other indexes out there. The S&P 500, for example, does a good job of measuring large-capitalization stocks, and