Charles Dow

Charles Dow was born in Connecticut and became a financial journalist. In 1882 he co-founded Dow Jones & Company with Edward Jones and Charles Bergstresser, and in 1889 co-founded The Wall Street Journal. In 1896 he created the Dow Jones Industrial Average — initially tracking 12 industrial stocks as a measure of overall stock market performance. The DJIA has been calculated and published continuously since then, making it the oldest continuously tracked stock market index in the world. Dow wrote a series of editorials in the Wall Street Journal from 1900-1902 that articulated what would become "Dow Theory" — a framework for understanding market price movements. Dow argued that markets move in identifiable trends: primary trends (major bull or bear markets lasting months or years), secondary trends (corrections within primary trends), and minor trends (short-term fluctuations). Trends are confirmed by volume and by confirmation across multiple indices. Dow Theory became the foundation of technical analysis and influenced every subsequent technical system. Dow died in 1902 without ever formally codifying his theory, which was later systematised by William Peter Hamilton and Robert Rhea. His creation of the DJIA provided markets with their first broadly-recognised benchmark.