Standard & Poor's Launches Index Designed to Track Prices of Commodity and Financial Futures Contracts

NEW YORK, Feb. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Standard & Poor's, the world's leading index provider, announced today the launch of the S&P Dynamic Futures Index ("S&P DFI"), an index designed to reflect the price momentum that physical commodities, interest rates and currencies tend to exhibit over the long-term due to their cyclicality. The Index offers rules-based exposure (both long and short) across a diversified portfolio of 24 highly liquid, global commodity and financial futures contracts grouped into 14 sectors.

"With the ability to go long or short sectors, the S&P DFI is designed to capture the economic benefit over long time periods derived from both rising and declining trends within a cross-section of the futures markets," says Michael McGlone, Senior Director of Commodity Indices for S&P Indices.  "The Index is also designed to be tradable and readily accessible to market participants."

The S&P DFI is comprised of 24 components (or futures contracts), grouped into 14 sectors (eight financials and six commodity), equally divided by weight. The financials include eight global financials futures contracts, while the commodities include 16 traditional, physical commodity components grouped into six sectors. Long or short positions are determined by measuring the current sector price relative to an exponential moving average.

Index constituent target weights are updated annually in order to ensure that their weights in the S&P DFI reflect current economic and production realities. For physical commodities, the target weights are updated to reflect the world production weights of the same commodities in the S&P GSCI Light Energy Index – the widely used, accepted standard in commodity indexing.

In a similar fashion, the target weights in the financial futures contracts are updated each year based on the relative size of the GDP -- an indicator of economic significance -- of the country represented by the contract.

For more information on the S&P Dynamic Futures Index, please visit: www.spgsci.standardandpoors.com.

About S&P Indices

S&P Indices, the world's leading index provider, maintains a wide variety of investable and benchmark indices to meet an array of investor needs. Over $1 trillion is directly indexed to Standard & Poor's family of indices, which includes the S&P 500, the world's most followed stock market index, the S&P Global 1200, a composite index comprised of seven regional and country headline indices, the S&P Global BMI, an index with approximately 11,000 constituents, and the S&P GSCI, the industry's most closely watched commodities index.  For more information, please visit www.standardandpoors.com/indices.  

About Standard & Poor's

Standard & Poor's, a subsidiary of The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE: MHP), is the world's foremost provider of independent credit ratings, indices, risk evaluation, investment research and data. With offices in 23 countries and markets, Standard & Poor's is an essential part of the world's financial infrastructure and has played a leading role for 150 years in providing investors with the independent benchmarks they need to feel more confident about their investment and financial decisions. For more information, visit http://www.standardandpoors.com

Standard & Poor's does not sponsor, endorse, sell or promote any S&P index-based investment product.

SOURCE Standard & Poor's