Standard and Poor's 500

Composed of 500 widely held common stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange and Over The Counter market. Comprises over 70% of the total market cap of all stocks traded in the U.S.

Like the DJIA, these are Large Cap stocks. Unlike the DJIA (price weighted), the SP500 is a market capitalization weighted price index. Market Cap weighted means: every stock in the index is represented in proportion to its market capitalization (the value of the total shares outstanding).

As a result, larger companies have more influence on the performance of the index. Only 45 stocks make up 50% of the S&P 500 index value. Recently all S&P Indexes: S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, S&P SmallCap 600 and S&P REIT Composite went to a free float weighting system that adjusts the market capitalization based weights of index components to reflect only those shares that are publicly available for trade.

Sector % of Index
Financial Services 20.3%
Healthcare 13.4%
Industrial Materials 12.2%
Hardware 10.8%
Consumer Goods 9.7%
Consumer Services 8.8%
Energy 6.5%
Software 4.5%
Business Services 3.9%
Media 3.9%

SP500 Component Performance
SP500 Component Weightings
SP500 Sector Performance