The Dow Theory: William Peter Hamilton's Track Record Re-considered

 

Stephen Brown, Alok Kumar and I have studied the performance of the Dow Theory over the period 1903 to the present. Using the editorials of William Peter Hamilton, we simulated the investment return achieved by someone who followed the theory. In addition, we used neural net methods to "extract" the theory from Hamilton's editorials, and test it out of sample. The working paper may be downloaded, and the published version appeared in the August, 1998 volume of the Journal of Finance. This site is a resource area for information about our analysis and the more recent Dow Theory performance. If you have a question about the paper, our data, our method or the recent performance of the theory, please refer to the links below. We hope they will be of some help.

Download Working Paper. This working paper version is downloadable from FEN. It will reflect any updates or corrections to the paper since publication.

Recent Performance of the Dow Theory A site maintained by Alok Kumar. We occasionally update the Dow Theory performance to see how it has done recently.

History of Charles Henry Dow and his Theory A site maintained by Charles J. Kaplan, President of Equity Analytics, Ltd.

William Peter Hamilton's Editorials A .pdf file with Hamilton's editorials. This is the raw data used to construct buy, sell and neutral signals for our analysis. It may be necessary to use Netscape Browser to view this file. We have had difficulties with Explorer for some reason.

Site where you can buy the Daily Dow Jones Index Data used in this study.

Historical Charts of the Dow-Jones Index Detailed graphs of the Index performance.

Monthly Data for the Standard and Poor's Composite, with Dividends and Earnings. This data is provided by ICF Fellow Professor Robert Shiller. It provides total returns to the stock market over much of the period of study.

Press clippings about the paper

Smart Money, July, 1998, "Good Timing"

The New York Times September 6, 1998"More Proof for the Dow Theory"

Forbes, April 6, 1998"The Dow Theory Still Lives"

Forbes, May 19th, 1997, "How now, Dow"

The Wall Street Journal 4/22/97(C1), "Risk-Adjusted Investment for the Meek: Making a Case For the Dow Theory"