The Dow Jones Industrial Average (Dow) is changing its composition of stocks today, both adding and deleting some well-known U.S. firms.  The table below lists the changes to the Dow.

Who's in:

• Goldman Sachs
• Nike
• Visa

Who's out:

• Bank of America
• Alcoa
• Hewlett-Packard

The goal of the Dow is to provide an indicator of conditions in the overall equity market by looking at just thirty representative stock prices.  Since they only use thirty companies and look strictly at average share prices, rather than the 500 equity-weghted stocks in the S&P 500, the Dow selection committee has to be very careful when choosing which stocks to include.