What Is S&P 500 (Standard and Poor’s 500)?
The S&P 500 (Standard and Poor’s 500) is a stock market index that tracks the performance of the top 500 publicly traded companies in the United States. It is one of the most widely followed indices in the world, and it serves as an important benchmark for investors to gauge how well their portfolios are performing relative to other stocks on the market. The index includes large-cap stocks from all 11 sectors of industry, including technology, financial services, consumer staples, energy, healthcare and more. Companies must meet certain criteria such as size and liquidity before they can be included in this prestigious list.
The S&P 500 has been around since 1957 when Standard & Poor’s first created it with just 90 companies listed at its inception. Since then it has grown significantly both in terms of number of constituents and total value tracked by the index. As a result, many investors use this index as a proxy for overall US equity markets because it provides them with an easy way to track broad market movements without having to analyze individual stocks or sectors separately. Additionally, some mutual funds also use this index as their benchmark so that they can measure their own performance against what is happening within these larger corporations over time.