Here is something you might find useful, over a century of Dow Jones prices! The Dow Jones Industrial Average was "invented" in 1896 and represents a portfolio of 30 of some of the biggest names in American business. Although there are only 30 stocks in this portfolio they are among the most actively traded. Of the original 30, only General Electric remains in the index today, the rest, mainly railway stocks, have long since disappeared, gone bust, been demoted to lesser averages or been taken over in mergers.

They didn't always record the Open/High/Low/Close/Volume figures, so for the earlier figures you will see I had to fudge some of the numbers, originally only the close figure was recorded so in Excel I spent the better part of an hour editing the file, making the next day's open equal to the previous day's close, they started recording High and Low on the 1st of October 1928, if you want "pure", unfudged data then delete all OHL info prior to that, only the closing price was recorded, ALL of the open figures prior to about 1970 are fudged, I set them to = the previous day's close, except when HL info was recorded I fixed it to remove the logical inconsistencies of open being higher than the high or lower than the low. This data isn't up to the minute complete. If you want the Dow Jones prices to fill in the data look them up from any of the various free data sources online, Yahoo Finance will do just fine (click on the "tables version" link). My editing converted the original data, which was useful only in Excel to standard ASCII Metastock format, so you can import it straight into your charting application.

Check out that little ripple in 1929, amazing! It took a while for the punters to get their negatively geared positions back into profit after that. Contrast this with 1987, the market just picked itself up and took off again straight away making it all back in very little time.

Click here to download dow.zip.

It is saved as a .csv file, which means you can open it in Excel with a click. Change the extension to whatever you like. Unfortunately this data does not include any volume information. My software didn't like it much when there was no volume, so I set it to a nominal 1 per day. My apologies for the mess with volume being recorded for a stretch and then reverting to nominal volume (you'll see what I mean if you examine the file), this data has come from a wide variety of sources, not a single download. If you would rather have a consistent data column just change everything in the volume column to some arbitrary number, it would be neater that way!

If anyone does have a complete set of data, with volumes included for the whole time and open figures recorded, let me know and I'll fix this file up. My All Ords data goes back to the 70s, if someone has this going back further I wouldn't mind a copy. If I can get some decent data I'll upload it here for others who want it.

If enough people ask me for it I may be tempted to put the Dow Jones Transport Average and Dow Jones Utilities Average here as well. but neither of these averages go back as far as the industrials, don't expect data spanning three centuries.