Apple Too Big For the Dow Jones Industrial Average

An anonymous reader writes "Apple is clearly the hottest tech stock on the market right now and the company is clearly at the vanguard of technological innovation. Consequently, many have wondered why Apple isn't part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). As it turns out, Apple's astronomical share price effectively prohibits the company from joining the DJIA as it would disproportionately influence the index."

Re:one other reason

[larry bagina]

Apple has a market cap of $382 billion and $70 billion in net asset value, so even if they appointed a no-talent ass clown like Michael Dell as CEO and he immediately liquidated everything, they're less than 6x overpriced.

Re:The Stock Market is a Joke

[FooAtWFU]

You're a FUD-spewing pinko-commie - which is not to say you're completely wrong, but you're missing the point.

It's true that to day-trade, it's all about the high-frequency crazy-fiber stuff. But you know what? You don't need a fiber link to go out and buy a share of McDonald's (today's prices: $87.48-$89.72) and pick up their ~61-cent quarterly dividend. You don't need a billion-dollar real-time system to pick up a piece of Apple ($412.00 - $421.59) and own a fraction of their still-growing revenue stream and cash hoard. You can go out there and place your order for just about as many shares as you care for, for any stock (or your selection of exchange-traded funds which hold hundreds of stocks for a minimal expense ratio), pay about $10, then come back three to thirty years and ask yourself "who fucking cares how fast the HFT traders were trading on 21 June 2011?"

HFT is all about things like spotting a tiny market inefficiency of a fraction of a cent across a half-billion shares on two different exchanges and exploiting it for whatever it's worth. You were never going to play that game; don't kid yourself.

Which is not to say that there aren't people rigging the game to their advantage all over the economy - but "high-frequency trading" isn't really the tool they're using. When you're in the really big leagues, your most powerful tool is The Government. (Bailouts, subsidies, implicit government guarantees, sketchy Solyndra loans, what have you.) Then, the next few rungs down on the latter are all about exploiting the shareholders of your publicly-traded company. That's the sort of thing we should worry about, not the HFT crap.