Did you not read my post? I said that the DJIA started in the late 1800s and that it was 381 at the start of the crash.
As for the low:
Yup. It fell from 381 (as noted by Exapno Mapcase above) to 195 in November 1929. It rallied slightly in 1930, but then dove as low as 40 in 1932.
Adding to what Exapno Mapcase and MikeS were saying … check out this chart that ChefGuy linked to earlier. If you go back to 1920-1940, you can see how the market plunged during the Depression. It’s kind of cool to see how it moves through the decades.
My quick and dumb question - is the DJIA “linear” - i.e., if it’s fallen by almost 30% since its high of 14,000 last October, does that mean that the share value of the companies that make up the index has, on average, fallen by almost 30%? Or is it more complicated than that?
It’s a bit more complicated.
Dow Jones Averages Methodology
At the same time, it’s probably not a bad first order approximation. The DJIA going down by 30% doesn’t give you exact information about any of the stocks, but you’re not going to be wildly off by assuming that on average their stock prices are down by about 30%. You just need to remember that the DJIA is a trend indicator more than an establisher of value.
It’s much more meaningful to look at percentage gains and losses than absolute numbers. So during the Depression, the Dow declined by almost 90%. That’s huge. But if it’s at 10,000 and then it drops 700 points, that’s a 7% drop.
I actually remember the first time it hit ***one ***thousand! (Wish I had bought some stock then.)