Index Services:
Providing an S&P Index for Every Type of Investment

Standard & Poor’s Index Services is the world’s foremost provider of stock market indices, offering a wide variety of investable and benchmark indices that meet an array of investor needs. Standard & Poor’s broad-based indices provide expansive access to the financial marketplace while its narrow-based indices give investors a greater ability to diversify portfolios. Partnerships with major exchanges throughout the world have resulted in enhanced investment choices and solutions for both retail investors and institutions alike.

Standard & Poor’s flagship index series, including the S&P 500 and the S&P Global 1200, are world-renowned as investable, transparent, and replicable offerings designed to serve as proxies for the different markets they measure.

Standard & Poor’s has a long history of creating indices that measure constantly evolving markets. New indices include:

• S&P Credit Default Swap (CDS) Indices reflect the credit default swap market for U.S. corporate credits. These indices increase transparency for market participants and offer insight into the performance of the U.S. CDS marketplace, including the investment-grade and high-yield markets. The S&P 100 CDS Index, the first CDS index based on an equity index, makes it easier to compare the performance of stocks and the $57 trillion¹ CDS market.
• S&P VIX Futures Index Series is a suite of investable indices offering directional exposure to volatility through publicly-traded futures markets. Developed in cooperation with the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), the indices model returns from a long VIX futures position that is rolled continuously throughout the period between futures expiration dates.
• S&P U.S. Commercial Paper Index is a broad-based index designed to serve the investment community’s need for a benchmark representing U.S. commercial paper which is a widely-held investment among money market funds and other short-term investors. This index is the first of its type to be offered by a major index provider.
• S&P Risk Control Index Series enables investors to target and control the level of risk in an underlying S&P index. Standard & Poor’s is the first independent index provider to make volatility-targeting indices widely available to investors.
  
• S&P Target Date Index Series is comprised of nine multi-asset class indices, each corresponding to a particular target retirement date. Each index is fully investable, with varying levels of exposure to equities and fixed income. This index series is innovative, in that asset class exposures are driven by a survey of large fund management companies that offer target date products.

⁽¹⁾ Bank of International Settlement, notional outstanding at month-end June 2008