Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street. Tuesday markets: The major U.S. stock benchmarks were lower across the board Tuesday afternoon ahead of Wednesday’s pivot Federal Reserve decision on interest rates. The Dow Jones Industrial Average remains on pace for its ninth straight negative session, a sour feat last recorded in 1978. The Dow’s recent struggles are getting a lot of attention, but investors need to remember that the 30-stock gauge has some major limitations that skew its headline performance. Our colleague Yun Li explored them in a piece published earlier today on CNBC.com . It has a lot of good insight, but among the most vital takeaways is that the Dow is a price-weighted average, meaning companies with higher stock prices have a larger influence. In the S & P 500 and Nasdaq Composite , each stock is assigned a weighting based on its market valuation. This nugget in Li’s story drives the point home:
