How has the Dow Jones Industrial Average done since Covid began?

The DJIA finished at 34,098 today.

See this Google Finance chart that covers the last 5 years.

The red line shows where Feb. 14, 2020 is. The DJIA closed at 29,398. The next closing was 29,232 on Feb. 18 (there must have been a weekend and a President's Day holiday in there). So a 168 point drop. By March 23, it was 18,591. More than a 10,000 point fall.

But it came back and although we are lower than the 36,000 we hit in late 2021, today's close is 16% higher than on Feb. 14, 2020 (34,098/29398 = 1.16). That might sound good but we should compare that to how much the Consumer Price Index had gone up.

The CPI was 258.678 in Feb. 2020. In March of this year, it was 301.836, which is 16.68% higher than in Feb. 2020. So the DJIA has gone up less than the CPI (and we are not even using this month's CPI since it has not been reported yet).

Usually the Dow rises more in percentage terms than the CPI. The chart below shows the annual percentage change for each from 1915-2022. The blue line is the Dow and the orange line is the CPI. Most of the time the blue line is positive and above the orange line.

Of the 108 years in the chart, the the Dow had a larger change than the CPI in 66 of them. The Dow was about 441 times higher in 2022 than it was in 1915 (32,898.34 vs. 74.45). The CPI was only about 29 times higher (292.655 vs. 10.1).

The annual compound percentage increase in the Dow from 1915-2022 was about 5.86% while for the CPI it was 3.18%.

Data for the DJIA came from Dow Jones - DJIA - 100 Year Historical Chart. That is a Macrotrends LLC site.

Data for the CPI came from Consumer Price Index Data from 1913 to 2023. That is a COINNEWS MEDIA GROUP LLC site.

For the CPI I used the annual average of the CPI (averaging each of the 12 month readings) to get the annual inflation rate. The official inflation rate for a year is found by comparing the CPI in Dec. of one year to the CPI from the previous Dec.