S&P/Citigroup Indexes Debut

Standard & Poor’s on [December 19] debuted six indexes that replaced the S&P/Barra indexes.

The new S&P/Citigroup indexes are market cap-weighted, and divide the cap of each index into growth and value indexes of approximately equal sizes. Stocks that do not have pure growth or pure value characteristics have their market caps distributed between the growth and value indexes.

The new indexes use seven factors to determine whether a stock falls into the value or the growth category, including a company’s historic earnings and sales growth rates, its dividend yield, and a stock’s price relative to the company’s book value and cash flow.