DJIA is a stock market index that is used to represent and measure the overall performance of the United States's economy.

DJIA was created to track the movement of industrial businesses in the US. Thus, stocks with higher share prices have a greater weight in the index than those with lower share prices. Such an index is called a price-weighted index. The stock values of 12 firms were added together and divided by 12 to arrive at an average. As time progressed, the index's computation was tweaked to account for the percent contribution of each component to the index's overall value.