NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Is there a fund available that buys the stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial index and, if so, do you think such a fund is a good choice?

-- Tom Poe, Maderia Beach, FL

There are a couple of ways you can get the Dow Jones Industrial average stocks in a fund (or something close to it). The easiest way is to buy a DIAMOND -- not a ring, but a security that's been designed to track the Dow's performance. Specifically, a DIAMOND is a portfolio of Dow stocks that trades on the American Stock Exchange (symbol: DIA), which allows you to buy or sell all 30 Dow stocks with one trade. To be technical, though, a DIAMOND isn't a mutual fund, but a unit trust, although for all practical purposes, the trust in this case operates similarly enough to a mutual fund so that I don't think investors need to be concerned about the difference.

You can also find a handful of mutual funds that buy the stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. For example, the Waterhouse Dow 30 fund specifically looks to track the performance of the Dow. A few other funds are more loosely based on the Dow. The Orbitex Focus 30, the Burnham Dow Focused 30, the Strong Dow 30 Value and Potomac Dow 30 Plus all invest in the Dow to some degree, although they don't necessarily buy the Dow 30 in the same proportion as the stocks exist in the index, which means the performance of these funds can deviate from that of the index itself.

But what I want to know is why would you want to buy the Dow Jones Industrial Average? I don't mean to dis the Dow. I even have a soft spot in my heart for Charles Dow, the co-founder of the Wall Street Journal who started the index back in 1896 as a way to track the USA's emerging industrial sector. (By the way, I believe Dow, who wore a long beard, bears a striking resemblance to the equally hairy guys on the Smith Brothers cough drops box. Separated at birth?) And for many people the Dow is probably the only stock-market index they've ever heard of. So for them, the Dow is the stock market.

Still, I wouldn't want to invest in it. Why? It's not that there's something terribly wrong with the Dow, it's just that, well, there's nothing very right about it either. Despite its populist appeal, it's not really a good proxy for the market. It consists of just 30 large-company stocks that represent well under half the total value of the U.S. stock market.

If you want to track the performance of U.S. large-caps, the Standard & Poor's 500 index, which includes 500 stocks, is a much better choice -- and it's available in scads of regular funds as well as ETFs, or funds that, like the DIAMOND, trade on an exchange. And if you want to track the performance of the entire U.S. market, you're better off buying a fund or ETF based on a broad index like the Wilshire 5000 or the Russell 3000, both of which are good benchmarks for all publicly traded stocks in the U.s.

The other thing I don't like about the Dow is that it's -- how should I put this? -- kind of squirrely. Virtually every other bona fide index is market-cap weighted -- that is, the larger a stock's market value, the more its performance counts in calculating the index's return.

The Dow, however, is price weighted, which means stocks with higher prices get more weight in determining the Dow's performance. So a 10 percent jump in the price of Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing, which recently traded at $122 a share, would boost the Dow's performance by about 84 points, while a 10 percent jump in the price of Microsoft, which recently traded at $62 a share, would boost the Dow by about half that amount, or 43 points.

MORE ASK THE EXPERT       Ask the Expert Ask the Expert: Investing

This makes no sense, since the ups and downs of Microsoft, which has a market value roughly seven times that of Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing, obviously have a much greater impact on the performance of the U.S. stock market overall. The price weighting is a vestige from the days when index values had to be calculated by hand. That methodology may have been acceptable at the beginning of the 20th century, but not today.

To sum up, I think you're on the right track to consider investing in a fund that will track a market index. But, with apologies to Charlie Dow, I think you can find many indexes that make a lot more sense than the Dow.