S&P 500

S&P 500

The S&P 500, or the Standard & Poor's 500, is a stock market index based on the common stock prices of 500 top publicly traded American companies, as determined by S&P. It differs from other stock market indices like the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq Composite because it tracks a different number of stocks and weights the stocks differently. It is one of the most commonly followed indices and many consider it the best representation of the market and a bellwether for the U.S. economy. The National Bureau of Economic Research has classified common stocks as a leading indicator of business cycles. It is a free-float capitalization-weighted index.

The index is maintained by Standard & Poor's, a division of McGraw-Hill that publishes a variety of other stock market indices such as the S&P 1500 and S&P Global 1200. The S&P 500 index has several ticker symbols: ^GSPC, .INX, and $SPX.