Blue Chip Stocks vs. Growth Stocks: Why More Than Half the Dow 30 Counted as Growth in S&P's Lists

Blue chip stocks are the shares of large, established, financially solid companies; the label is informal, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a common list of them. Growth stocks are shares of companies whose sales and earnings are expected to grow faster than the market's. The two labels answer different questions, size and reputation on one side, the pace of growth on the other, so a company can be both. The index providers' own lists show how often that happens.

How the index providers define growth and value

S&P Dow Jones Indices splits the S&P 500 into a growth index and a value index. The descriptions below are those published by State Street on the pages of its two ETFs that track them, read again on November 2, 2026. They describe the method in force until December 21, 2026.

• S&P 500 Growth, until December 21, 2026. It “consists of those stocks in the S&P 500 Index exhibiting the strongest growth characteristics based on: (i) sales growth; (ii) earnings change to price; and (iii) momentum,” weighted by float-adjusted market value (State Street SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 Growth ETF).
• S&P 500 Value, until December 21, 2026. It holds the stocks with the strongest value characteristics, based on “(i) book value to price ratio; (ii) earnings to price ratio; and (iii) sales to price ratio” (State Street SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 Value ETF).
• Blue chips. No provider publishes a “blue chip index” as such. The Dow is described by State Street as “composed of 30 ‘blue-chip’ U.S. stocks,” price-weighted, with members chosen by an Averages Committee (State Street SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF Trust).

A stock can sit in both style indexes at once, as the holdings below show. Growth is therefore a measured style inside the large-cap market, not a separate group of small or young companies.

Are blue chips growth stocks? The Dow 30, sorted

We matched the 30 Dow stocks against the daily holdings files of the growth and value ETFs, as of October 29, 2026, before the December 2026 reconstitution (DIA holdings; SPYG holdings; SPYV holdings).

Seventeen of the 30 blue chips are at least partly growth stocks by S&P's measure, and four are growth only. Across the whole S&P 500, the holdings files list 503 stocks: 152 in the growth index and 434 in the value index, with 83 in both (SPY holdings). Apple, for example, was 7.11% of the growth fund and 8.29% of the value fund. Under the October 2026 lists, the answer to “blue chip or growth?” was often “both”; the new rules may move some of these stocks.

Growth vs. value: the numbers

The number of stocks and the trailing price/earnings are those of the index (State Street publishes the trailing price/earnings for the index only); the other figures are those of the ETF, which holds the stocks of its index (the value ETF listed 435 holdings and its index 434; the extra line is a Hologic contingent value right, not a stock). Growth stocks were priced higher relative to earnings, with faster expected earnings growth, and yielded less. They do pay dividends: the growth ETF yields 0.47%, so the idea that growth stocks pay no dividends does not hold for this index. Half of the growth index is technology, which is the main concentration risk of the style.

These are the index returns published by State Street as the funds' benchmarks, annualized; before December 17, 2010 the growth benchmark was a Dow Jones growth index, a date earlier than all four windows. Growth led over every period shown. With 53.71% of the growth index in technology today, these returns depend heavily on one sector, and the window, which ends on September 30, 2026, says nothing about the next ten years. We have no price history of the growth and value indexes in our own data, so we cannot measure their falls or compare them on other periods; the comparison of the Dow 30 with the full S&P 500, which we could measure over 28 years, is in blue chip stocks vs. the S&P 500.

Blue chip stocks vs. growth stocks, point by point

For a single company, the risk is not the label but the business: our page on blue chips against the S&P 500 shows General Electric, then a Dow blue chip, losing 85.5% with dividends from 2000 to 2009. At the other end of the market are penny stocks, and other asset classes are compared in asset classes.

Which one fits you

• If you want the broad market, an S&P 500 index fund already holds both styles in their market weights.
• If you want more growth exposure, a growth index fund tilts toward it, with more technology and a lower yield.
• If you want more income, the value side yields more, 1.64% for the value ETF against 0.47%.
• If you pick single stocks, check where each one sits in the style indexes, how much of your account it takes, and how you would react to a 50% fall; see position size.