I see a couple of problems with these arguments. First, the assumption that market capitalization is more important for weighting a market index than share pric

I see a couple of problems with these arguments. First, the assumption that market capitalization is more important for weighting a market index than share price. I'd argue that if your goal is to measure the health of the overall stock market, companies that control the most money should be weighted not much more than less valuable companies. Just because Wal-Mart, Amazon, and Costco are doing great, doesn't mean that JCPenny, Macy's and smaller retailers that employ hundreds of thousands of people are doing great. Giving more weight to smaller companies introduces more companies than just those at the top of the value spectrum. A company with massive resources can probably weather certain negative economic variations better than smaller companies, so to focus solely on those to the exclusion of all others seems to be willfully ignoring a significant part of what comprises the overall market. The other issue is that even though the S&P is cited as being a much better index to track the market, the fact is that the Dow and the S&P correlate almost identically historically. So even if the Dow is reasoned to be much worse than the S&P, history shows that they both reflect basically the same thing.