Standard & Poor's 500 Index - S&P 500

  

Categories: Index Funds

The Standard & Poor's 500 is a U.S. stock market index that's based on 500 major companies in the U.S. If you want to know how the U.S. stock market is doing, check the S&P 500. It's "the market," more or less, even though the popular financial press quotes the Dow (which is just the top 30 largest American firms). The Dow was highly relevant when there were 500 public companies in the world, 100 years ago. Today, eh, not all that representative anymore of the broader market.

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Finance: What is the S&P 500?45 Views

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finance a la shmoop. what is the S&P 500? well the S&P 500 is just an index- that

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is the standard and poors company assembled 500 stocks put them on a

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spreadsheet- this was a spreadsheet in 1957 -and they tracked them. [spreadsheet pictured]

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well the index had something like 37 shares of Procter & Gamble, the 23 shares

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of Ford, 18 shares of IBM and so on. in the 1950s the S&P 500 totaled something

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like 40 maybe 50 bucks on a good day. at the end of each day the elves who worked

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inside of the S&P Factory, they would add up the shares basically ignore any

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dividends and send to the press a total which was published to more or less

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everyone who cared about investing. well not nearly even a century later the 40 [man reads newspaper]

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to $50 reign to the SNP is today knock on the door of 2,500 .so without even

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having dividends reinvested you'd have made 50 times your money with dividends

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reinvested to buy more shares instead of keeping the cash to buy you know

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groceries or electric massage slippers. you'd have made over 70 times your [grocery display case and slippers pictured]

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original investment. welcome to America.

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