The LSE Directory / Index providers
S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC designs, calculates, maintains and licenses stock market indices, most prominently the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, alongside a broad family of other benchmarks spanning equities, fixed income, commodities and multi asset strategies. The firm does not manage money itself; it sells the right to use its index methodologies and real time index values to asset managers, banks and exchanges, which then build ETFs, mutual funds, options, futures and structured notes on top of those benchmarks. It operates as a division of S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI), headquartered in New York, with staff across roughly 15 cities worldwide including London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney and Dubai. The firm's differentiator versus other global index providers is governance: index composition and eligibility rules, market cap floors, liquidity and float tests, and sector balance for the Dow, are set and periodically revised by an index committee rather than a purely mechanical formula. A recent example is the minimum unadjusted market capitalization for new S&P 500 entrants, raised to $22.7 billion (from $20.5 billion) effective July 1, 2025, with parallel increases for the S&P MidCap 400 and SmallCap 600; existing constituents are grandfathered under prior rules. Its customers are overwhelmingly institutional rather than retail, exchanges license index values to settle options and futures contracts, and fund sponsors license the S&P 500 and DJIA methodology and brand to build passive products, a licensing model shared by other major global index providers such as MSCI, FTSE Russell and Nasdaq's index business. The current entity was formed in 2012 when what is now S&P Global combined its Standard & Poor's index business with the Dow Jones Indexes business, 90% of which CME Group had bought from Dow Jones & Company (then owned by News Corp) for $607.5 million in February 2010. CME Group bought out Dow Jones & Company's remaining minority interest in April 2013, leaving S&P Global with 73% ownership of the joint venture and CME Group with 27%. Its lineage predates the joint venture by well over a century: the Dow Jones Transportation Average, which S&P DJI still calculates, was created by Charles Dow in 1884, the Dow Jones Industrial Average followed in 1896, and the S&P 500 in 1957. Catherine Clay became CEO on November 1, 2025, succeeding Dan Draper, who moved into a Special Advisor role; Clay joined from Cboe Global Markets, where she had been Executive Vice President and Global Head of Derivatives, and she reports to S&P Global President and CEO Martina Cheung. In May 2021, S&P DJI paid a $9 million penalty to settle SEC charges that it failed to disclose an "Auto Hold" feature in its S&P 500 VIX Short Term Futures Index that kept published index values static for part of the trading day during the February 5, 2018 volatility spike, a lapse the SEC tied to roughly $1.8 billion in estimated losses on Credit Suisse's VelocityShares Daily Inverse VIX exchange traded notes. In March 2026, S&P DJI licensed the S&P 500 to the derivatives platform Trade[XYZ] for what it describes as the index's first officially sanctioned perpetual futures contract, trading 24/7 on the Hyperliquid blockchain and aimed at non US investors seeking leveraged S&P 500 exposure outside normal market hours. Separately, in April 2026 the firm opened a consultation, since adopted, on waiving the standard GAAP profitability test, shortening the 12 month public trading seasoning period to six months, and waiving the 10% float requirement for "MegaCap" companies valued above roughly $112 billion ahead of anticipated public listings such as SpaceX, a change that drew public criticism from governance commentators concerned about forcing passive index funds into large positions in unprofitable companies.
