NEW YORK, July 14, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Dow Jones Indexes, a leading global index provider, today launched the Dow Jones GCC Titans 40 Index, which measures the performance of 40 component stocks traded in five of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and United Arab Emirates (UAE). The five countries included in the index are accessible to foreign investors.
The index has been licensed to Van Eck Global, a provider of global investment products, to serve as the basis for an exchange-traded fund. This is the first time that a pure GCC index has been licensed to underlie an ETF.
"The Dow Jones GCC Titans 40 Index is the next step in our efforts to build a family of GCC indexes. On July 1st we launched the first indexes in this series, the Dow Jones GCC and Dow Jones Islamic Market GCC indexes," said Michael A. Petronella, president, Dow Jones Indexes. "As part of the Titans index family, this index represents the biggest and most liquid investable blue-chip stocks for the GCC region and facilitates investor participation in an important world market."
"The Gulf region is one of the world's fastest growing and most sought after markets. The countries are seeking to diversify away from energy and to develop their financial markets," said Jan van Eck, principal at Van Eck Global.
The Dow Jones GCC Titans 40 Index is weighted by float-adjusted market capitalization. Weights of individual stocks are capped at 8% in each country, with a maximum of 15 companies per country without an additional cap on country weights. Stocks must have an average daily trading volume of US$1 million to be qualified for the index. Eligible securities are ranked by float-adjusted market capitalization, with the top three companies in each of the five countries being automatically selected as index components. Additional components are selected top-down from the pool of all remaining companies until 40 components are reached. Back-tested estimated daily index history will be available back to December 31, 2003. The base value is set at 1000 as of June 30, 2008.
The index is calculated in U.S. dollars (USD), and reviewed annually in June. During quarterly reviews, float factors and shares are updated and eligible IPOs are added, replacing the smallest index components.
For more information in the Dow Jones GCC Titans 40 Index, please visit www.djindexes.com.
The Dow Jones GCC Titans 40 Index was first published on July 14, 2008. All estimated daily historical closing prices prior to that date are based on back-testing (i.e., calculations of how the index might have performed in the past if it had existed). Backtested performance information is purely hypothetical and is solely for informational purposes. Backtested performance does not represent actual performance, and past performance is not indicative of future results.
Journalists may e-mail questions regarding this press release to PR-Indexes@dowjones.com.
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About Dow Jones Indexes
A full-service index provider, Dow Jones Indexes develops, maintains and licenses indexes for use as benchmarks and as the basis of investment products. Best known for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Dow Jones Indexes also is co-owner of the Dow Jones STOXX indexes, the world's leading pan-European indexes, and together with Wilshire Associates, provides the Dow Jones Wilshire Global Index family, which is anchored by the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 and covers more than 12,000 securities in 61 markets. Beyond equity indexes, Dow Jones Indexes maintains a number of alternative indexes, including measures of the hedge fund and commodity markets. Dow Jones indexes are maintained according to clear, unbiased and systematic methodologies that are fully integrated within index families. www.djindexes.com
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