S&P Dow Jones Indices


S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC is a joint venture between S&P Global, the CME Group, and News Corp that was announced in 2011 and later launched in 2012. It produces, maintains, licenses, and markets stock market indices as benchmarks and as the basis of investable products, such as exchange-traded funds, mutual funds, and structured products. The company currently has employees in 15 cities worldwide, including New York, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, Beijing, and Dubai.
The company's best known indices are the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was created in 1896. The company also manages the oldest index in use, the Dow Jones Transportation Index, created in 1882 by Charles Dow, the founder of The Wall Street Journal.

Indices defined

A market index follows a certain market and gives investors a single number to summarize its ups and downs. It enables the world's institutional investors to track a market or market sector without having to aggregate the underlying components. It is a convenient way for someone interested in a broad, narrow, or extremely narrow group of securities to track them.
Pension funds and other money managers often use indexes as benchmarks. This means that "active" investors track their own returns against a benchmark index to see if they are out- or under-performing that market. Investors who do not want to do this are called "passive" investors. They are known to link their portfolios to the broad market and do not try to outguess conventional market wisdom. Passive investors argue that almost no active investors can beat the overall markets in the long-term. This choice is described by a theory in investing called the efficient market hypothesis.

Indices by S&P Dow Jones

The DJI has over 130,000 indexes, although many are used by only relatively few people. Most are principally equity indexes but also contain fixed-income, futures, options, private equity, commodity, currency, bond, and other alternative asset class metrics. Dow Jones Indexes says that all its products are maintained according to clear, unbiased, and systematic methodologies that are fully integrated within index families.
DJI and Sustainable Asset Management, launched the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices in 1999. These indexes track performance of sustainability-driven companies around the world. There are currently 70 DJSI licenses held by asset managers in 16 countries to manage a variety of financial products, including active and passive funds, certificates and segregated accounts.
DJI partnered with AIG to create the Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index. It tracks trades on futures contracts for physical commodities, like energy, precious metals, industrial metals, grains, livestock, among others.
UBS Securities LLC has acquired AIG Financial Product Corp.'s commodity business as of May 6, 2009. As such, the Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Indexes have been re-branded as the Dow Jones-UBS Commodity Indexes effective May 7, 2009.
The Dow Jones Select Dividend Indexes reflects the performance of leading dividend-yielding stocks. It includes global and regional indexes. It was DJI's first fundamentals-driven index.
Dow Jones Indexes also does "specialty" indexes for specific markets or interests. It has the Dow Jones U.S. Economic Stimulus Index, the Olympic-inspired Dow Jones Summer/Winter Games, the race-car centric Dow Jones Formula 1 Index and the closely followed Dow Jones Luxury Index, among others.
Companies can also request that specific indexes be created to suit their clients' interest or for publicity purposes. This is popular with smaller asset management and public relations firms.

Recent history

DJI launches an average of one index or index family per week. It often creates an index for a specific event, a specific market, or a very small market. In some instances it cooperates with other entities to create a custom index.
Dow Jones Industrial Average historical data recently became available on a new website, www.djaverages.com. The company also has a widely read quarterly newsletter called Insights that covers the industry.

Recent notable developments at DJI

The City of New York also declared the day to be "Dow Jones Industrial Average Day."
Later that month, Dow Jones Indexes and BBVA jointly launched the Dow Jones BBVA EAGLEs Indexes series, which initially includes two market gauges each designed to measure the stock performance of 50 leading companies in emerging and growth-leading economies. The first set of EAGLEs included China, Indonesia, India, South Korea, Mexico, Taiwan, Brazil, Russia, Turkey and Egypt.
The company produces a quarterly news magazine called Insight. The company has topical Market Commentary videos, video interviews and press events for researchers, academia and market makers to use.