US stock indices over time

Three numbers stand in for “the US stock market”: the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the Nasdaq Composite. They measure overlapping but different slices of the same market, and the news quotes all three. The chart below puts them on one set of axes — where each closed at the end of every year — so you can see how closely they move together, and where they part ways. Hover or tap to read off any year and the change on the year before.

The S&P 500 and the Dow run from 1960; the Nasdaq Composite begins at its 1971 launch. All three are price indices, so they exclude dividends — a long-term investor who reinvested them did better still.

Why a log scale, and why the lines sit so far apart

The three indices are quoted on completely different scales — in 2024 the Dow closed around 42,500, the Nasdaq around 19,300 and the S&P 500 around 5,900 — so a linear axis squashes the two smaller lines against the floor and hides the early decades entirely. A log scale fixes both problems: the vertical gap between the lines is just their different point levels (which are arbitrary), while the slope of each line is its growth rate. Read that way, the indices track each other closely for most of the period — with one famous exception.

The three indices, in brief

• S&P 500 — 500 of the largest US-listed companies, weighted by market value, so the biggest firms dominate. It is the benchmark most professional investors actually track and the best single picture of the broad market. It is also the closest American equivalent of London’s FTSE 100.
• Dow Jones Industrial Average — the oldest and most-quoted gauge, first published in 1896, made up of just 30 large companies and price-weighted (a higher share price sways the index more, regardless of company size — a quirk left over from hand calculation in the 1890s). Its round-number milestones make headlines: it first closed above 1,000 in 1972, 10,000 in 1999, 20,000 in 2017 and 40,000 in 2024.
• Nasdaq Composite — every common stock listed on the Nasdaq exchange, thousands of them, heavily tilted toward technology. That tilt makes it the most volatile of the three: it soared furthest in the dot-com boom, fell hardest in the bust, and has led the market again in the smartphone-and-AI era.

What the chart shows

• 1973–74. A deep bear market amid the oil shock and stagflation roughly halved all three indices.
• 1987 — Black Monday. A fall of about 20% in a single day on 19 October — 22.6% on the Dow, its worst day ever — yet all three still finished the year close to flat.
• 1995–99 — the dot-com boom. The lines fan apart: the tech-heavy Nasdaq roughly quintupled in five years, far outrunning the Dow and S&P.
• 2000–02 — the bust. The Nasdaq lost about three-quarters of its value from peak to trough — a far deeper hole than the broader market — and took 15 years to regain its 2000 high.
• 2008 — the financial crisis. A roughly one-third fall across the board, the worst year since the 1930s, bottoming in March 2009 before the longest bull market on record.
• 2020 — the COVID crash. The fastest-ever fall into a bear market in February–March, then a stimulus-fuelled recovery to new highs led, again, by the Nasdaq.
• 2022. A rate-driven pullback — sharpest on the Nasdaq — followed by fresh records, including the Dow’s first close above 40,000 in 2024.

Sources

• FRED — S&P 500 index, St. Louis Fed.
• FRED — Dow Jones Industrial Average, St. Louis Fed.
• FRED — Nasdaq Composite index, St. Louis Fed.
• S&P Dow Jones Indices — S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average.