Institutional Investor Index

If we take the name literally, the Institutional Investor Index should have provided a way to track the activity of institutional investors. It didn't. The name of the index actually came from the fact that it was published by Institutional Investor magazine. (The index was more for institutional investors than it was about them).

The measure actually tracked sovereign debt risk...the likelihood that a particular government would default on its bonds. Basically, the index asked: what country is most safe for your money? (The index was also known as the Country Credit Survey.)

Institutional Investor magazine published the index from the 1970s until 2016.