The $43 Billion ETF Hiding in Plain Sight. Why DIA Might Outperform SPY and QQQ for the Rest of 2026.

Rob Isbitts

Tue, May 19, 2026 at 2:14 PM EDT 6 min read

The Dow Jones Industrial Average ($DOWI), what a joke right? WRONG.

The oldest of the three “headline” indexes tracking U.S. large-cap stocks has been the butt of many jokes in recent years. But I can make a case that it might just laugh all the way to the proverbial bank. At least for the last seven months of 2026.

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For years, the investing world has been entirely dominated by cap-weighted performance. If you didn’t own a concentrated basket of tech and AI giants, you simply weren’t keeping up. That dynamic pushed the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) and the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) to historic highs, while the SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF Trust (DIA) was largely dismissed as a boring, backward-looking relic.

The “cool kids’ table” has two members. QQQ and SPY. And if they were to let in a third, it would likely be the State Street Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLK) or the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), since what do a couple of tech-laden stock indexes need to feel better about themselves than to have MORE tech, more semiconductors, and more AI-mania to tell them how great they are.

That’s all a metaphor of course. But you can see just how the asset flows have shaken out over time. The Dow? $43 billion in assets? That’s like a rounding error in the wide world of narrowly focused equity index ETFs.

Has DIA’s performance severely lagged that of SPY and QQQ for several years? Absolutely. Is that alone a reason to be curious about it now? Absolutely! Note I did not say “go out and buy it, sight unseen.”

That type of sustained underperformance indicates one of two things:

1. A structural change in how markets work, where tech is forever king (DIA owns a notably lower tech allocation than the other two ETFs).

2. A cyclical comeback for the stocks not currently in favor, versus the couple of handfuls that crowd the top of SPY and QQQ.

I do not want to overstate the “Dow is value-ish vs. SPY/QQQ are growth-ish” differences. Those are part of my rationale for liking the Dow 30 and DIA here, relative to QQQ and SPY.

But beyond the quirky price-weighting system used by the Dow committee back to its inception in the 19th century (no, I was not present in 1896 when the 12-stock Dow first came to be), there’s something more obvious to me. The Dow has 30 stocks, which means they are easy to follow. And it covers far more sectors than the other two, from the standpoint of meaningful contribution to the index’s total weight.