The importance of indices

Every day, finance professionals across the world look to FTSE Group  for index tools to help them manage their investment portfolios.

Inclusion in FTSE’s world-class indices bring major benefits for companies listed on the Main Market. Indices are crucial for comparing performance against a peer group and support liquidity and capital-raising.

The FTSE UK Index Series is designed to represent the performance of primary listed Main Market companies, providing investors with a set of indices that measure the performance of the UK equity market.

Increasing exposure
Becoming a constituent of the FTSE UK Index Series helps to build greater liquidity for Main Market companies by providing investors with clear and independent benchmarking of stocks, sectors and the market as a whole. It also creates the basis for portfolio trading by both active and passive investors. Institutional investors offering retail funds, which explicitly benchmark the FTSE 100, FTSE 250, FTSE SmallCap and FTSE All-Share indices, account for almost £50 billion of investment – over 60 per cent of which is held in tracker funds that are obliged to purchase exposure to the constituents of those indices.

Primary listed Main Market companies are potentially eligible for the FTSE UK Index Series, one of the most recognised in the world, which includes the well-known FTSE 100 Index. Secondary listed companies and DRs are not eligible for inclusion in the FTSE UK Index Series.

FTSE is an independent company owned by The Financial Times and the London Stock Exchange.