The School of Business Administration has established a new custom S&P Dow Jones stock market index to measure the performance of publicly traded companies in Florida. The University of Miami’s Florida 50 Index is the first index to measure performance of firms from the S&P Composite 1500 Index headquartered in a single state, and the first custom S&P Dow Jones index owned by a university.

The index is based on the capitalizations of about 50 Florida-based large-, mid- and small-cap companies included in the S&P 1500 index having common stock listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ. It is intended to become an effective representation of the stock market and a bellwether for the Florida economy.

The index is available under ticker symbol UMIAMIFL through the S&P website.

“The establishment of the University of Miami’s Florida 50 Index illustrates our commitment to producing knowledge that can have a positive impact on the wider community,” said Gene Anderson, dean of the School of Business Adminstration. “By gauging and regularly reporting on the performance of the top corporations in Florida, we will provide new insight that we believe will be valuable and of significant interest to businesses, policy makers, and individuals statewide and beyond.”

The objectives of the index are:

• To assess daily investor confidence of the Florida business climate;
• To promote a better understanding, analysis, and forecast of changes in the Florida economy;
• To provide a means of incorporating empirical measures of investor buying and selling behavior into trading models;
• To gauge the overall levels of bullishness/bearishness in Florida’s economy vs. nationwide.

Interestingly, from January 20, 2004 (the date used to set the index) to December 31, 2015, the University of Miami’s Florida 50 Index beat the S&P 1500 by more than 30 percent.

As of December 31, 2015, the index’s 10 largest firms were NextEra Energy (NYSE:NEE), CSX Corporation (NASDAQ:CSX), Carnival Corporation (NYSE:CCL), Roper Industries (NYSE:ROP), Royal Caribbean Cruises (NYSE:RCL), Fidelity National Information Services (NYSE:FIS), Jarden Corporation (NYSE:JAH), Citrix Systems (NASDAQ:CTXS), Harris Corporation (NYSE:HRS), and Lennar Corporation (NYSE:LEN).

“We are excited to be the chosen as the calculation agent for the University of Miami,” said Michael Mell, director of custom indices at S&P Dow Jones Indices. “By expanding our custom hybrid indexing capabilities beyond financial services, S&P DJI is able to provide the academic community with benchmarks tailored to their unique needs.”