AAPL to the Dow Jones Industrial Average” is the talk of the day today pushing the stock up about 1% and helping the Nasdaq-100, reference ETF tracker QQQ (PowerShares QQQ, Expense Ratio 0.20%)) hang in there in spite of flagging performance today in other key members.
This announcement of course was not an event completely out of left field, as we have been talking about the possibility of AAPL’s inclusion to the Dow, reference ETF tracker DIA (SPDR DJ Industrial Average, Expense Ratio 0.17%) since 2013 in various written pieces here.
At the time the limitation was the stock’s high price per share (pre-stock split) and the potential carnage it could have created in daily index calculation due to oversized price weighting).
Alas, AAPL has since split the stock and it trades with a $128 split adjusted handle today. In its current state AAPL would weigh in at about #5 in the DJIA, even though it is the largest stock by market capitalization in the world, and of course the largest weighted member in the S&P 500 Index at about (4.03%).
Because the DJIA is price weighted and not market cap weighted of course, V with its $272 handle, GS with its $188 handle, MMM $165 handle and IBM with its handle of $159 will have higher weightings in the index than AAPL, and thus more individual potential to impact the overall index price given the movements in the stocks.