Dow Jones Indexes
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| S&P Dow Jones Indices | |
| Joint venture of S&P Global, CME Group and Dow Jones & Company, which is a subsidiary of News Corp | |
| Founded | 15 Wall Street, New York (1882) |
| Founder | Charles Dow, Edward Jones, Charles Bergstresser |
| Headquarters | 55 Water Street, New York, NY |
| Parent |
S&P Global (with CME Group and News Corp as minority partners) |
| Website | www |
S&P Dow Jones Indices /daʊ ˈdʒoʊnz/ 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 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, Beijing, and Dubai.
The company's best known indices are the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), 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.
A market (plural: indices) 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.
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Wikipedia