What's the different between a composite stock and the index??

for anyone that knows anything about stocks, can someone tell me what is the different between the ^IXIC, the composite and the NDAQ, the nasdaq stock market thing, and how come you can't buy stock for IXIC, is it a index? and if how do you buy stock from DOW
I'm so confused

The IXIC is the actual stock ticker symbol for the NasDaq. It is the compiling of 5000 stocks listed on the NasDaq Exchange to give a standardized indication of the overall market performance of the Exchange. This is just a tool, like a barometer, for the market. If you want to buy the actual NasDaq, than you would buy shares under the ticker symbol NDAQ. This is for tha actual exchange, which is not indicative of the performance of this IXIC. The two could very easily go in opposite directions. So, when it comes to indices, you cannot buy them...you can, however, buy index Funds, which means these are Funds (Mutual, ETF, iShare, etc) that are constructed very similiarly to whatever Index they are attempting to mirror. The same is true for DJI, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (as DOW is the symbol for Dow Chemicals). This is an index of companies (30 of them) and so it cannot be purchased.

The reason they can't be bought like a company's shares is because they are not companies. For a company to issue shares the company has to register the issuance with the SEC, which is time consuming and expensive. Since this is merely a compilation of a bunch of companies, you cannot buy into it....that is where ETFs and Mutual Funds come in to play.

Hope this helped.

This is one of those crazy, complex things that you kinda learn along the way. It all seems @$$-backwards, but that is just the way things are on Wall Street.