The Dow Jones Industrial Average is not only an arbitrary number, but it is a flawed indicator of how well the stock market is performing.For starters, the index only considers 30 large stocks. Companies like Apple, Johnson & Johnson, and Microsoft are members. Between the NYSE and Nasdaq alone, there are more than 5,100 publicly traded companies, and the index only represents less than 1% of them.Additionally, it is a price-weighted index, meaning that stocks with higher share prices matter more to the index's performance.