<prompt> Human: The Dow is quoted everywhere: nightly news, this forum, cnn.com, NPR, wsj.com not surprising since Dow Jones owns them. Please do yourself a favor and disregard anything you hear about it. The only value in the Dow is that its widely quoted and is correlated to the larger stock market. But in that case, why not pay attention to the larger stock market indices like SP 500 or Wilshire 5000?In short, the Dow Jones Industrial Average represents a small number of very large industrial companies in the US. It is price-weighted. That means regardless of actual size market cap of the companies, they are weighted based on stock price, an arbitrary result of the number of shares that company has issued fewer shares higher price stock. Side note: if Apple hadnt split its shares 7:1 before joining the DJIA, it would have represented roughly 20 of the index not a coincidence they split 11 months before replacing ATT in the DJIA. Additionally, no one invests in DJIA index funds this should be a pretty good indicator of its uselessness but most people do invest in funds that focus on tracking the SP 500s performance. So please, pay attention to the SP 500 or another market-cap weighted large cap stock index to track the performance of that particular asset class in your portfolio. Additional Info:NPR Planet Money Podcast on the DJIAs futility: Additional bullet points from Investopedia: DJIA: 1. 30 North American stocks picked by the Wall Street Journal 2. Calculated through a method of simple mathematical averages 3. Higher-priced stocks affect the average more than lower-priced ones.SP 500: 1. 500 North American stocks picked by an SP board 2. A wider range of sector representation 3. Calculated by giving weights to each stock according to their market value 4. Regardless of stock price, a percentage change will be reflected the same on the index.Edit: My initial point was that the Dow is flawed and doesnt communicate what most people think. It represents the performance of a few stocks that sometimes correlate to the large cap stock market; it does not accurately represent the stock market as a whole, large caps stocks, or equity portfolio performance. There are indices that do actually communicate greater stock market performance, e.g., SP 500 or Wilshire 5000.Given the markets recent volatility, the comments here are mostly ignoring my point and focusing on short-term decreases of retirement balances. To that point I will reiterate a comment I made below: only look at your portfolio for scheduled annual or semi-annual rebalancing and reallocating. Trading already deposited that is, excluding new funds within a retirement account should only happen a couple times per year. That is, ignore the recent market fluctuations; retirement investment strategies are inherently created for the long term, so the short-term changes are irrelevant and you shouldnt pay any attention to it. Five letters: R-E-L-A-XAssistant: 500 North American stocks picked by an SP board500 companies and 505 individual stocks...The DJIA is often quoted because it has the biggest swings and will give the biggest fear factor in the nightly news... The SP was down 21 points today isnt nearly as bad as The DJIA closed down 249 points today. The market drops are normal, and are a great time to keep investing. If your favorite food at the grocery store was on sale for 25 less would you buy more or say youre worried and will get rid of all of it in your house? Stay the course and regardless of how the SP or DJIA perform youll be happy when retirement comes. Human: Yes, sensationalist journalism likes the large numbers of the DJIA and I think thats the main reason its so often quoted in media. All the more reason to ignore the DJIA.Additionally, when media says, Dow suffered its largest loss in... they refer to the absolute number of points, not the relative percentage. So while we keep having the biggest loss in insert time frame, its only the largest because the index is relatively much larger in terms of points.  <response>: Mostly I just hate that they give points. I want a fucking percentage. I dont know what the DJIA or SP are rated at on a given day, so 200 points is meaningless information. Saying that the DJIA dropped 0.1, though, doesnt have that same punch. 