Wilshire 5000

The Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index, or more simply the Wilshire 5000, is a market-capitalization-weighted index of the market value of all actively traded in the United States. As of December 31, 2016 the index contained only 3,618 components. The index is intended to measure the performance of most publicly traded companies headquartered in the United States, with readily available price data, (Bulletin Board/penny stocks and stocks of extremely small companies are excluded). Hence, the index includes a majority of the and REITs traded primarily through , NASDAQ, or the . Limited partnerships and ADRs are not included. It can be tracked by following the ticker ^W5000.

There are five versions of the index:

The difference between the total return and price versions of the index is that the total return versions accounts for reinvestment of dividends. The difference between the full capitalization, float-adjusted, and equal weight versions is in how the index components are weighted. The full cap index uses the total shares outstanding for each company. The float-adjusted index uses shares adjusted for free float. The equal-weighted index assigns each security in the index the same weight.

Let:

The value of the index is then:

At present, one index point corresponds to a little more than US$1 billion of market capitalization.

The list of issues included in the index is updated monthly to add new listings resulting from corporate spin-offs and initial public offerings, and to remove issues which move to the pink sheets or that have ceased trading for at least 10 consecutive days.

The CRSP U.S. Total Market Index (ticker CRSPTM1) is a very similar comprehensive index of U.S. stocks supplied by the Center for Research in Security Prices. It was especially designed for use by Index funds. After Dow Jones and Wilshire split up, Dow Jones made their own total stock market index, called the Dow Jones U.S. Total Stock Market Index, similar to the Wilshire 5000.

...
Wikipedia