Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. A stock market index is a measure of a section of the stock market. Several indices are cited by news or financial services firms and are used as benchmarks to measure the performance of portfolios such as mutual funds. An index can be weighted to represent the market capitalization of its components, or can be a simple representation of the net change in the prices of the underlying instruments or components. Some famous stock market indices are the American S&P 500, the British FTSE 100, the French Cac 40 and the Japanese Nikkei 225...