Dow Jones Industrial Average 1897-2012

I'm currently working on a more detailed Infographic on the behaviors of the stock market index Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) during World War 2. It seems like Yahoo finance has removed the option to download the data from their website, I've googled the answer and found a strange answer to why they removed it, but that answer is not important here. So, to find the data, I went here: Fred Economic Data, and downloaded it, and you can find yearly closes from the middle of 1896 until today. I haven't seen old data on that index before, so here comes some basic calculations (I've excluded 1896 and 2013 from the data):

Figure 1. Dow Jones Industrial Average 1897-2012 with a logarithmic scale

Figure 2. Dow Jones Industrial Average 1897-2012 - yearly changes

On average, the daily gain during this period was 0.0265 percent, this wasn't a big surprise since the stock market will increase over the long term.

The 10 best days were (the format is year-month-day):
  1. 1933-03-15: 15.34%
  2. 1931-10-06: 14.87 
  3. 1929-10-30: 12.34
  4. 1931-06-22: 11.90
  5. 1932-09-21: 11.36 
  6. 2008-10-13: 11.08
  7. 2008-10-28: 10.87 
  8. 1987-10-21: 10.14 - 2 days after the Black Monday
  9. 1932-08-03: 9.52 
  10. 1939-09-05: 9.52 Germany invaded Poland September 1, and on September 5, US announced it's neutrality in the European conflict
The 10 worst days were:
  1. 1987-10-19:  -22.61%  - the Black Monday
  2. 1914-12-14: -20.53 - This was not a true daily drop since Dow Jones closed in July because of World War 1 and remained closed until December. Since World War 1, the exchange has remained open through wars, natural disasters, and economic crises.
  3. 1929-10-28: -13.47 
  4. 1899-12-18: -11.99 
  5. 1929-10-29: -11.73 
  6. 1931-10-05: -10.73 
  7. 1929-11-06: -9.92 
  8. 1932-08-12: -8.40 
  9. 1907-03-14: -8.29 
  10. 1932-01-04: -8.10

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