The Dow is the most familiar index of the performance of shares traded on Wall Street, and measures the performance of 30 companies, most of which are traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Several are also traded on the NASDAQ exchange.

During the last recession, the Dow fell from a high of 14,164.43 on October 9, 2007 to a low of 6,547.05 on March 9, 2009. It had continued to fall for the first several weeks of President Barack Obama's first term — particularly, it seemed, after major policy speeches — but stabilized after most of the country's major financial institutions passed a stress test in the spring of that year. Since then, the Dow has climbed throughout the Obama era, breaking new records regularly in a long "bull market."

The markets had expected Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election. Stocks fell for several days straight after FBI Director James Comey announced a re-opening of his agency's probe into Clinton's email server on Oct. 28.