It was better to get money selling the territory to a neutral country than getting it stolen by an enemy. Purchase of Alaska, 1867. Russia offered to sell Alaska to the United States in 1859, believing the United States would off-set the designs of Russiaâs greatest rival in the Pacific, Great Britain.
The value of the Dow futures is often quoted before the stock market opens as an indicator of how the market will react during the trading day. Trading Dow futures is one way traders attempt to profit from the value changes of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Even investors who don't trade futures can use the Dow futures as a forecasting tool.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), often referred to as the Dow Jones or simply as the Dow, is a price-weighted average of the stocks of 30 large American publicly traded companies. Created by Charles Dow in 1896, it is the most well-known U.S. stock index and is used to gauge the market's performance from day to day. What is a price-weighted index? In a nutshell, a price-weighted index means that higher-priced stocks have more influence over the index's performance than lower-priced ones.