Dow Jones Out With New Global Index

I check in on the front page of Marketwatch.com and I spy a new index over there on the right side with the other indexes, oil price, bond yields and gold. It is called the Global Dow at MarketWatch and as I hover over it I see it just started tracking today, 11-11-2008. So I am curious and start digging to see if there is any new news but find very little.

The Global Dow, symbol GDOW, started tracking yesterday on Google Finance, half-way through yesterday on MarketWatch and this morning on Yahoo Finance. A couple of search tries at WSJ.com came up empty.

Here are some interesting facts on this new index. They have back dated to get returns back to 2001 (base value 1000 on 12/31/2000), but we will consider the index newborn yesterday. The GDOW opened on Monday, 11-11, with a value of 1,558.34. It is sitting right at 1,500 as I write this. The index consists of 150 stocks from both established and emerging markets and both established and emerging industries. The component stocks were chosen at the whim of the folks at Dow Jones. More data:

• Median market cap: $33 billion.
• Mean market cap: $51 billion.
• Smallest and largest market cap: $1. billion and $385 billion.
• Dividend yield: 2.98%
• Trailing PE (including negative): 11.52

Breakdown by region:

• North America: 43.91% (U.S.: 42.27%)
• Europe: 31.99%
• Asia + Australia: 21.29%
• Latin America: 2.82%

All data is as of October, 31, 2008. Source Dow Jones.

I like having a single global index to keep an eye on and it will be interesting to see how the components change as time goes along. You can see the complete list of companies in the index and obtain more information at www.globaldow.com.

Subscribe by RSS Subscribe by Email