Thanks for that.Jeremy Siegel in his book The Future for Investors has *exhaustive* research on holding the original stocks in the S&P 500 and found that the returns beat the returns on the standard, continually updated S&P Index and did so with lower risk. And that in spite of the fact some 30 of the original index eventually went bankrupt. I haven't seen any research on the Dow but doubt it's much different. The so-called current darlings underperform after they are added to the index ( example is the tech stocks added just before the tech crash) and the ones deleted tend to outperform.
Edited by Drano, 16 August 2008 - 09:27 AM.