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By Staff Reporters

Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Index

What it is: Investment company Standard & Poor’s maintains an index of 500 stocks from the largest companies listed on the NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange. To be eligible for consideration, companies have to meet certain criteria—including a market cap of $8.2+ billion, a U.S. headquarters, and positive earnings for at least four consecutive quarters. They can be kicked out if they slip.

How it works: Companies are weighted by their market cap, specifically their float-adjusted market cap (which only counts shares that are theoretically available for retail investors to buy). That means the S&P skews toward larger cap companies, and tech stocks now account for over a quarter of the index’s total value.

Why it matters: With 500 stocks covering a broad range of industries, the S&P is widely considered the best indicator of large-cap stocks in the U.S. While the S&P’s weighting-by-market-cap method is more common than the Dow’s weighting by share price, it does introduce some risk that overvalued stocks will inflate the overall index.

CITE: https://www.r2library.com/Resource

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Technology stocks staged strong a comeback yesterday, giving the S&P 500 its best day since early June.

For example, Nvidia led the pack, thanks in part to reports that it’s developing an AI chip for the Chinese market.

But, one company notably excluded from the tech party was CrowdStrike, which continued to plunge after causing worldwide chaos with a bad update.

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Filed under: Alerts Sign-Up, Glossary Terms, Information Technology, Investing | Tagged: AI, CrowdStrike, Cyber Security, IT, Nvidia, S&P 500, Standard & Poor's, technology stocks |