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When reading Japanese financial news, I found that different units were used for different stock indexes. For example, ドル／セント was used for Dow Jones Industrial Average, while ポイント was used for NASDAQ Composite. (Emphasis mine)

結局、ダウ工業株30種平均の終値は、前の日より、161ドル60セント高い、2万8,653ドル87セントと続伸し[...]

一方、ハイテク株主体のナスダック総合指数は反発し、70.29ポイント上がって、1万1,695.63と[...]

Why are different units used to describe the different indexes? Why is Dow described in dollar, and NASDAQ in point?

This is different from English's terminology, where point was used for Dow.

My initial guess is that the weighing method has something to do with the units used. Dow is price-weighed where NASDAQ is market cap-weighed. But I could not work out how this leads to different units being used.

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    the Japanese is following the convention used in the US. this doesn’t seem to really be a question for this particular forum. you should perhaps ask this on a marketing forum.
    – A.Ellett
    Aug 29 '20 at 15:55
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    According to Wikipedia: "To calculate the DJIA, the sum of the prices of all 30 stocks is divided by a divisor, the Dow Divisor ... Early on, the initial divisor was composed of the original number of component companies; this initially made the DJIA a simple arithmetic average."
    – broccoli facemask
    Aug 29 '20 at 16:08
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    @A.Ellet, in what sense is the Japanese "following the convention used in the U.S."? In the U.S. we might say "the Dow was up 287 points," or "the Dow was up 1%," but I don't think I've ever heard anyone say something like "the Dow was up 287 dollars." (And of course, 287 points on the Dow does not represent $287 in value.)
    – Nanigashi
    Aug 29 '20 at 18:16
  • @A.Ellett I considered posting to Money.SE instead of Japanese. I picked here because it is easier to get a financial expert here than to get a Japanese expert there.
    – Link Ng
    Aug 30 '20 at 2:32
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    So I did a little digging into this. It's pretty weird. From what I can find, most foreign indices are in points except the Dow Jones. The Nikkei is in yen, but the TOPIX is in points as well. I wonder if it's simply based on when the index was created/translated?
    – Ringil
    Aug 31 '20 at 12:05

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