Script Pipeline

There is a company called Standard and Poor. They are one of the companies that rates things on the stock market. The most famous thing that they rate, there's a company called Dow Jones that has an average of the industrial companies which creates the Dow Jones industrial average, which is a little strange because a lot of the companies are not industrial anymore. It comes from the, you know, when America was more manufacturing driven than it is today. The S&P Standard and Poor rates the top, the largest 500 companies that are publicly traded, meaning their stock is sold on what we call the Big Board, the New York Stock Exchange. So these are the largest 500 companies that sell stock in America. It's a good indication of what the economy is doing. It's a good indication certainly of what the stock market is doing because basically they make up the vast majority of the stock market. So the top 500 companies on the New York Stock Exchange is called the S&P Standard and Poor S&P 500. Now that's important because that's actually a better way of measuring what the stock market is doing than the Dow is, okay, or the Dow Jones industrial average or any other measure for that matter. This is a very generic measure and people in the financial world use the S&P 500 as a plumb line to tell what the market is doing. If a mutual fund for instance outpurchase performs the S&P 500, that means the mutual fund is making better returns than the market as a whole.