| Abstract: | The investment world has many indexes that track the performance of baskets of stocks, bonds, commodities, real estate, and other assets. But to date, no index explicitly combines credit quality with equity selection. Based on this, Standard&Poor's Market, Credit, and Risk Strategies (MCRS) group set out to use Standard&Poor's credit ratings to create several portfolios of stocks from S&P 500 companies sorted by various rating categories. With these portfolios in hand, the next step--creating trackable indexes and/or mutual funds or exchange-traded funds--became feasible. As we first noted in our Oct. 13, 2008, commentary, results of this research indicate that such an index could help investors obtain superior risk-return performance at little additional cost over existing indexes
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