Dow switches up two component stocks

Dow Jones & Co. will drop Altria Group Inc. and Honeywell International Inc. from the 30-stock Dow Jones Industrial Average, effective Feb. 19, and will replace the two companies with Chevron Corp. and Bank of America Corp, the exchange announced.
These changes, the first to the DJIA since April 8, 2004, reflect several factors.
Altria Group’s recently announced plan to spin the Philip Morris international tobacco business off into a separate corporation will leave Altria a much smaller entity.
Altria had already spun out Kraft Foods Inc. in March 2007.
Dow Jones executives say they are eliminating Honeywell International because it is the DJIA’s smallest industrial, both in revenue and net income.
For Chevron, this will mark a return to the Dow Jones; The first time, as Standard Oil Co. of California, it was on the exchange from February 1924 to August 1925.
The company re-joined the exchange in 1930, but was replaced on Nov. 1, 1999.
The Chevron name was adopted in 1984.
The addition of Bank of America will make the DJIA a more finely-tuned indicator of a stock market that has been hypersensitive to credit, and particularly the mortgage market since mid-2007, observers say.

Related Topics: Bank Of America Corp.