How the 4 Newest Dow Stocks Have Surprised Investors

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJINDICES: ^DJI) has been around for more than 120 years, and it provides a simple measure of how the stock market is doing. The Dow doesn't make changes to its component stocks very often, but when it does, investors watch them very closely and track them to see whether they were good choices for the benchmark to make. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is the newest member of the Dow, having come into the average in 2015, while Nike (NYSE: NKE), Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), and Visa (NYSE: V) were all in a batch of new Dow stocks in 2013. Yet the surprising thing is that these stocks haven't behaved the way that many investors would have thought.

Apple had to wait a long time to become a member of the Dow, and gaining admittance required some major moves from the iDevice giant. Notably, a 7-for-1 stock split brought Apple's share price down to a range at which it wouldn't have too high an influence on the price-weighted benchmark, and many believe that it either paved the way for inclusion in the Dow or was negotiated prior to the event as a precondition for Dow admittance.

Source: Fool.com