Charles Dow - the man who changed the stock market forever

Charles Dow made a huge contribution to the development of the stock exchange and radically changed the perception of traders and investors to the movement of stocks and other assets in the commodity and derivatives markets.

Charles Dow also went down in history as the creator of the most important barometer of the US economy - the Dow Jones Index.

Dow was born on November 6, 1851 into a family of poor farmers.

Since childhood, Charles did not particularly like his parents’ main source of income, and even more so the prospect of continuing the family business scared him very much. That is why at the age of 18, without any education, a young man leaves his home and farm and gets a job as a journalist in a small provincial newspaper.

Pioneer. Career advancement

After a very successful start at a local provincial newspaper, where Charles headed a column on the economy, he was offered a position at The Providence Star newspaper, where he would be a financial journalist.

Charles became so interested in newspaper editors for his work in the previous newspaper that he began a new movement in the field of financial journalism.

Until recently, the area of ​​finance was the most closed, so not a single newspaper paid attention to this issue. The first articles to which Charles Dow devoted himself concerned the extraction and sale of precious metals.

Like any beginner, initially his articles were like small reviews with all the information available. However, after some time and deepening into the process, his articles began to resemble analytical forecasts, where the author laid out the main indicators, forecasts for the future that you will not believe began to come true.

Due to the fact that Charles was a pioneer in the field of finance, his career as a journalist went up at any rate.

That is why he was noticed by the well-promoted New York media outlet “New York Mail and Express”, where he began to write in great detail about the mining industry, analyzed the main key players and shared the insider information he actually obtained. Time to work for yourself

Any journalist, by the nature of his work, begins to acquire personal contacts and sources of information, and in the case of Charles these were various stock exchange offices and major players.

Realizing that Dow, together with his partner Jones, owned simply colossal information, which, in their opinion, began to cost money, they decided to release their newsletter called “Customer's Afternoon Letter” in which the author began to publish data on the daily dynamics of stock prices.

This newsletter became so popular that the organizing partners began to earn huge amounts of money, and could arouse additional interest among stock exchange participants for certain stocks.

Previously, traders and all participants in the stock exchange believed that the price of an asset appeared randomly, so no one had ever tracked the dynamics of changes in the stock price per day.

With the advent of the newsletter, stock market players began to look at certain trends in the market, and thanks to its table, the Dow aroused increased interest in high-growth stocks, which greatly revived trading.

In 1889, Dow and his partner closed the newsletter and opened a new project, “The Wall-Street Journal,” which has become one of the most influential media outlets to this day.

Dow and his partners were so advanced that The Wall-Street Journal had no competitors for almost 50 years. Realizing that journalism is far from the limit of possibilities, Charles Dow comes up with the most famous world index, the Dow Jones Index, which combines a number of shares of the largest US companies.

Today, it is difficult to imagine a major investor or trader who, before starting to trade shares of US companies, would not look at this index in order to get acquainted with the real situation in the economy.

In 1902, at the age of 51, Charles Dow passed away and only after some time his theory and developments were published by the editor-in-chief of The Wall-Street Journal.