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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 companies which is a little strange because a lot of the companies are not

industrial anymore that are part of that old-timey term but it can 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.

And that

they as this group of companies goes is 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 stock the vast majority of the stock

So the top 500 companies on the New York stock exchange is called the&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 then 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.

So if a mutual fund, for instance, outperforms the S&P 500, that means the mutual fund is making better returns than the market as a whole.

If it underperforms the S&P 500, it makes less returns.

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