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One hundred and twenty years after its birth, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is as relevant as ever. There’s hardly a news story about the American stock market that doesn’t mention the index’s industrial average.

The idea of the Dow, an index of stock prices of 30 highly-valued and influential American companies, was first conceived by Charles Dow and Edward Jones, two financial journalists who went on to become the founders of The Wall Street Journal. Understandably, a lot has changed since 1896. The original 12 companies that made up the Dow, save for General Electric, have all disappeared from the index. At the time, those companies represented that era’s major economic outputs: sugar, energy, rubber, steel, and leather.

Also, at first, the Dow contained only industrial stocks (hence the name), and back then, investors were actually mostly interested in bonds. As financial historians note, the Dow became increasingly important over time, and by the 1950s, everyday Americans began to invest in stocks, as opposed to just professional traders.

Source: The Dow: An Index of Winners

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Facebook [stckqut]FB[/stckqut] has set out to power all advertising across the Internet.To that end, the social network and online advertising company said Thursday it will now help marketers show ads to all users who visit websites and applications in its Audience Network ad network. Previously Facebook only showed ads to members of its social network when they visited those third-party properties.

The change is a subtle one, but it could mean Facebook will soon help to sell and place a much larger portion of the video and display ads that appear across the Internet. The change will also intensify competition with Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Google [stckqut]GOOG[/stckqut] [stckqut]GOOGL[/stckqut], which dominates the global digital-advertising market, and a wide range of other online ad specialists.

Facebook disclosed in March that about 1.65 billion people now use the site each month. According to the International Telecommunication Union, a total of 3.17 billion people used the Internet globally in 2015.

To date, Facebook has only showed ads across its Audience Network to Facebook users, targeted based on information the company has collected about its users’ tastes and behaviors. Now Facebook plans to collect information about all Internet users, through “like” buttons and other pieces of code present on Web pages across the Internet. It will then use the information it collects to target ads to non-Facebook users.

Source: Facebook Wants to Help Sell Every Ad on the Web – WSJ

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The U.S. economy is doing a lot better than advertised. But listening to what companies say, investors might find that hard to believe.

Gross domestic product grew at a 0.8% annual rate in the first quarter, according to revised estimates released by the Commerce Department on Friday. That was better than the initially reported 0.5% rate. But it was still awfully soft, marking the slimmest gain since the first quarter of last year when a harsh winter walloped the economy.

The weakness in the GDP report dovetails with the weak first-quarter results many companies reported. Indeed, the Commerce Department also reported its measure of pretax corporate profits (which unlike GDP aren’t adjusted for inflation) rose just 0.3% from the fourth quarter—1.4% at an annual rate. From a year earlier, profits were down 5.7%.

But GDP seems out of step with other economic reports, suggesting there is something to arguments that there are problems with how the first-quarter figures are getting adjusted for seasonal swings.

Source: The Economy vs. Earnings: Companies Aren’t Winning