Stock indexes for the 1920s

prr — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 17:07:34 GMT

I am looking for a decent way to measure the increase of stock prices in the USA in the 1920s, up till the Crash in October, as well as down to the trough in 1932.

The only stats I've seen are using a New York Times Index, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The problem with the latter is that quite a bit of its constituent companies in 1924 were not there in 1929. So I'm wondering how valid it would be to say that the DJIA rose by x% in 5 years, when some half of the companies weren't part of the makeup of that 1924 index average.

My problem with the NYT Index is that there is almost no information on its makeup, and from what little I've gathered, it is a rather small index (as few as "eight leading stocks"), which isn't a very good indicator of the overall health or price of US stocks.

Can anyone provide me with some information that would help me out--either another index (I see that the S&P 500 wasn't around in the 1920s) or some data on one of these two indexes I've mentioned above that can shed some light on comparing stock prices in 1924 to 1932?

I suppose I could simply create my own index--take the 10 largest companies, in terms of revenue, market cap, etc., and then measure them throughout this time period, but I'm wondering if anyone has done this already.

Economics Questions

Stock indexes for the 1920s