S&P Dow Jones Indices

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S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC
S&P Dow Jones Indices
Type Joint venture
Founded1882;141 years ago (1882)
Founder Charles Dow, Edward Jones, Charles Bergstresser
Headquarters 55 Water Street, New York City, New York, United States
Owner
Website www.spdji.com OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

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 (ETFs), 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.

Contents

The company's best known indices are the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), which were created in 1957 and 1896, respectively. 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 .

S&P Global (formerly McGraw Hill Financial, Inc.), owner of Standard & Poor's, controls 73% of the joint venture, CME Group owns 24.4% through its affiliates.

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 (and retail) 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 (those who pick various securities to buy and hold for their returns) track their own returns against a benchmark index (an index that typifies its market) to see if they are out- or under-performing that market. Investors who do not want to do this (those who buy into indexes or securities that use indexes as their basis) 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 (stock) 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 (SAM), 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 (petroleum, gas), precious metals (gold, silver), industrial metals (zinc, copper), grains (corn, wheat), livestock (lean hogs, live cattle), 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 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 (i.e. Dow Jones 2008 Summer Games Index, launched December 2007), a specific market (Dow Jones Luxury Index, launched June 2008), or a very small market (Dow Jones Cyprus Titans 10 Index). In some instances it cooperates with other entities to create a custom index (Barron's 400 Index, launched September 2007).

Dow Jones Industrial Average historical data (along with several other major indexes) is available from the company's main site. The company also has a widely read quarterly newsletter called Insights that covers the industry.

In December 2020, DJI removed certain sanctioned companies with ties to the People's Liberation Army from its indices. [1]

In January 2021, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced that, on February 1, 2021, or before, China National Offshore Oil Corp's (CNOOC) securities will be removed due to the US sanctions. [2] In May 2021 the SEC fined the company for pausing data. [3]

Research information

The company produces a quarterly news magazine called Insight. [4] The company has topical Market Commentary videos, [5] video interviews [6] and press events [7] for researchers, academia and market makers to use.

See also

Related Research Articles

Passive management is an investing strategy that tracks a market-weighted index or portfolio. Passive management is most common on the equity market, where index funds track a stock market index, but it is becoming more common in other investment types, including bonds, commodities and hedge funds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dow Jones & Company</span> American publishing and financial information company

Dow Jones & Company, Inc. is an American publishing firm owned by News Corp and led by CEO Almar Latour.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Commodity market</span> Physical or virtual transactions of buying and selling involving raw or primary commodities

A commodity market is a market that trades in the primary economic sector rather than manufactured products, such as cocoa, fruit and sugar. Hard commodities are mined, such as gold and oil. Futures contracts are the oldest way of investing in commodities. Commodity markets can include physical trading and derivatives trading using spot prices, forwards, futures, and options on futures. Farmers have used a simple form of derivative trading in the commodity market for centuries for price risk management.

An index fund is a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) designed to follow certain preset rules so that it can replicate the performance ("track") of a specified basket of underlying investments. While index providers often emphasize that they are for-profit organizations, index providers have the ability to act as "reluctant regulators" when determining which companies are suitable for an index. Those rules may include tracking prominent indexes like the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average or implementation rules, such as tax-management, tracking error minimization, large block trading or patient/flexible trading strategies that allow for greater tracking error but lower market impact costs. Index funds may also have rules that screen for social and sustainable criteria.

Dow Jones is a combination of the names of business partners Charles Dow and Edward Jones.

An exchange-traded fund (ETF) is a type of investment fund that is also an exchange-traded product, i.e., it is traded on stock exchanges. ETFs own financial assets such as stocks, bonds, currencies, debts, futures contracts, and/or commodities such as gold bars. The list of assets that each ETF owns, as well as their weightings, is posted on the website of the issuer daily, or quarterly in the case of active non-transparent ETFs. Many ETFs provide some level of diversification compared to owning an individual stock.

A commodity price index is a fixed-weight index or (weighted) average of selected commodity prices, which may be based on spot or futures prices. It is designed to be representative of the broad commodity asset class or a specific subset of commodities, such as energy or metals. It is an index that tracks a basket of commodities to measure their performance. These indexes are often traded on exchanges, allowing investors to gain easier access to commodities without having to enter the futures market. The value of these indexes fluctuates based on their underlying commodities, and this value can be traded on an exchange in much the same way as stock index futures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">B3 (stock exchange)</span> Brazilian stock exchange and OTC market

B3 S.A.– Brasil, Bolsa, Balcão, formerly BM&FBOVESPA, is a stock exchange located in São Paulo, Brazil, and the second oldest of the country.

Active management is an approach to investing. In an actively managed portfolio of investments, the investor selects the investments that make up the portfolio. Active management is often compared to passive management or index investing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FTSE Group</span> British provider of stock market indices

FTSE International Limited trading as FTSE Russell ( "Footsie") is a British provider of stock market indices and associated data services, wholly owned by the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and operating from premises in Canary Wharf. It operates the well known UK FTSE 100 Index as well as a number of other indices. FTSE stands for Financial Times Stock Exchange.

The S&P GSCI serves as a benchmark for investment in the commodity markets and as a measure of commodity performance over time. It is a tradable index that is readily available to market participants of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The index was originally developed in 1991, by Goldman Sachs. In 2007, ownership transferred to Standard & Poor's, who currently own and publish it. Futures of the S&P GSCI use a multiple of 250. The index contains a much higher exposure to energy than other commodity price indices such as the Bloomberg Commodity Index.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CME Group</span> American financial derivatives company

CME Group Inc. is a financial services company. Headquartered in Chicago, the company operates financial derivatives exchanges including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, New York Mercantile Exchange, and The Commodity Exchange. The company also owns 27% of S&P Dow Jones Indices. It is the world's largest operator of financial derivatives exchanges. Its exchanges are platforms for trading in agricultural products, currencies, energy, interest rates, metals, futures contracts, options, stock indexes, and cryptocurrencies futures.

The S&P/ASX 300, or simply, ASX 300, is a stock market index of Australian stocks listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). The index is market-capitalisation weighted, meaning each company included is in proportion to the indexes total market value, and float-adjusted, meaning the index only considers shares available to public investors.

The Deutsche Bank Liquid Commodity Index (DBLCI) was launched in February 2003. It tracks the performance of six commodities in the energy, precious metals, industrial metals and grain sectors. The DBLCI has constant weightings for each of the six commodities and the index is rebalanced annually in the first week of November. Consequently, the weights fluctuate during the year according to the price movement of the underlying commodity futures.

In May 2006, Deutsche Bank launched a new set of commodity index products called the Deutsche Bank Liquid Commodities Indices Optimum Yield, or DBLCI-OY'. The DBLCI-OY indices are available for 24 commodities drawn from the energy, precious metals, industrial metals, agricultural and livestock sectors. A DBLCI-OY index based on the DBLCI benchmark weights is also available and the optimum yield technology has also been applied to the energy, precious metals, industrial metals and agricultural sector indices. Like the DBLCI, the DBLCI-OY is available in USD, EUR, GBP and JPY on a hedged and un-hedge basis. The DBLCI-OY is rebalanced on the fifth index business day of November when each commodity is adjusted to its base weight. The DBLCI-OY is also listed as an exchange-traded fund (ETF) on the American Stock Exchange.

AIG Financial Products Corporation (AIGFP) is a subsidiary of the American International Group, headquartered in New York, New York, with major operations in London. The collapse of AIG Financial Products, headquartered in Wilton, Connecticut, is considered to have played a pivotal role in the global financial crisis of 2008–2009.

STOXX Ltd. is a globally integrated index provider, covering the world markets across all asset classes – developing, maintaining, distributing and marketing a comprehensive global family of strictly rules-based and transparent indices. STOXX is part of Qontigo, which was created in 2019 through the combination of STOXX, DAX and Axioma. Qontigo is part of Deutsche Börse Group, headquartered in Eschborn with key locations in New York, Zug and London. STOXX calculates more than 16,000 indices and in addition acts as the administrator for the DAXindices.

The Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI) launched in 1999, are a family of indices evaluating the sustainability performance of thousands of companies trading publicly, operated under a strategic partnership between S&P Dow Jones Indices and RobecoSAM of the S&P Dow Jones Indices. They are the longest-running global sustainability benchmarks worldwide and have become the key reference point in sustainability investing for investors and companies alike. In 2012, S&P Dow Jones Indices was formed via the merger of S&P Indices and Dow Jones Indexes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stock market index</span> Financial metric which investors use to determine market performance

In finance, a stock index, or stock market index, is an index that measures the performance of a stock market, or of a subset of a stock market. It helps investors compare current stock price levels with past prices to calculate market performance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RobecoSAM</span>

Robeco Schweiz is an international investment company with a specific focus on sustainability investments. It was founded in 1995 by Reto Ringger. The company is based in Zurich, Switzerland, and considers economic, environmental, and social criteria in its investment strategies. In addition to asset management, the company has an indexes and private equity portion of the business. In 2006 RobecoSAM introduced a division called sustainability services that provides sustainability benchmarking reports to companies. In 2001, the then-RobecoSAM became the first carbon neutral company in Switzerland.

References

  1. Galbraith, Andrew (December 10, 2020). "S&P DJI removes Chinese firms from indexes after U.S. order". Reuters. Retrieved December 10, 2020.
  2. "S&P Dow Jones Indices to remove oil giant CNOOC due to sanctions". Reuters. January 14, 2021. Retrieved January 14, 2021.
  3. Jonathan Stempel. (17 May 2021). "S&P Dow Jones Indices is fined by SEC over U.S. 'volatility' crash". Yahoo Finance website Retrieved 18 May 2021.
  4. "S&P Global Platts Insight Magazine". spglobal.com. Retrieved April 10, 2020.
  5. "Dow Jones Indexes » Media Center » Market Commentary". djindexes.com. Archived from the original on July 28, 2011.
  6. "Dow Jones Indexes » Media Center » Video Interviews". djindexes.com. Archived from the original on August 3, 2011.
  7. "Dow Jones Indexes » Media Center » Press Events". djindexes.com. Archived from the original on May 9, 2011.