Slightly off-topic, but still in the arena of stock markets, we can report that the doughty Dow Jones industrial index of shares on Wall Street is an astonishing 110 years old.

That’s a very good age for a quasi-scientific metric of share values. Created by Charles Dow, editor of The Wall Street Journal, it started with just 12 constituent companies, and even now has only 30.

Changes to the Dow are rare and at the whim of individual editors conscious of the tradition. They don’t deal much with market capitalizations or alternative measures considered objective by rival operators. It’s unscientific and market professionals mostly use the S&P 500. As the Times comments: “… for many it remains the unquestioned barometer of US capitalism.”

We wish them every success for the next 110 years.