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

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What is the S&P 500? It's Standard & Poor's 500 generally largest companies, with a U.S. domestic bias. The S&P 500 is usually what investors think of when they think "the market." This entity is used as an index indicator of stock performance in most calculations, and ticker SPY is the most famous index fund in this group.

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Transcript

00:00
finance a la shmoop. what is the S&P 500? well the S&P 500 is just an index- that
00:08
is the standard and poors company assembled 500 stocks put them on a
00:13
spreadsheet- this was a spreadsheet in 1957 -and they tracked them. [spreadsheet pictured]
00:17
well the index had something like 37 shares of Procter & Gamble, the 23 shares
00:23
of Ford, 18 shares of IBM and so on. in the 1950s the S&P 500 totaled something

00:29
like 40 maybe 50 bucks on a good day. at the end of each day the elves who worked
00:34
inside of the S&P Factory, they would add up the shares basically ignore any
00:39
dividends and send to the press a total which was published to more or less
00:43
everyone who cared about investing. well not nearly even a century later the 40 [man reads newspaper]
00:47
to $50 reign to the SNP is today knock on the door of 2,500 .so without even
00:53
having dividends reinvested you'd have made 50 times your money with dividends
00:57
reinvested to buy more shares instead of keeping the cash to buy you know
01:02
groceries or electric massage slippers. you'd have made over 70 times your [grocery display case and slippers pictured]
01:07
original investment. welcome to America.
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