Clash of the Indexes

摘要

If you think the competition in the National Football League playoffs is in-tense, take a look at Wall Street's index playoffs. These big-money games pit the nation's most popular stock indicator, the Dow Jones industrial average, against the nation's most important stock indicator, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. Until recently, the Dow-S&P fight was strictly inside baseball, to mix sports metaphors. The public used the 80-stock Dow as a shorthand for the stock market; money managers used the more broadly based 500-stock S&P as a benchmark to measure investment performance. When it came to investing, there was no competition: S&P has been licensing its indexes for mutual funds and other investment products for about 20 years, while Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal, wouldn't license its Dow averages, lest it sully its image.