Charles Dow and Edward Jones created the first index in 1896 to provide a sense of whether the market was on the whole going up or down by averaging the prices of individual stocks. Since then, creating and providing indices has become a big business — and a fiercely competitive one at that.
Today, indices such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500, FTSE 100, MSCI, Nifty and Sensex are among the best-known brands in financial markets. But the index providers did not reach this pole position by tracking the performance of a set of assets in a standardised way.
