Fidelity Investments will keep price ceilings intact on four of its stock
index mutual funds in a bid to stay competitive in the low-cost index fund
market.

Salomon Smith Barney (SSB) has launched what may be one of the first global
indexes intended as an independently created extension of a competing provider’s
index.

Stoxx Ltd., the European equities index compiler and affiliate to Dow Jones
Indexes, thinks it is winning the market share battle in Europe for pan-European
and Eurozone (i.e. EU countries only) derivatives trading.

The past few months have seen more signs that Asian indexes and index funds
are becoming more important to investors in the Asia-Pacific region.

So institutional assets in index funds alone in the US were $1.6 trillion at year end 1998, after more than doubling from 1995 to 1998. Of the nearly 1500 institutional funds followed by Greenwich Associates, 24.4% of their total assets are invested in passive management strategies. Since the bulk are probably indexed to the Standard & Poor’s 500, that’s similar to a fifth or a quarter of the industry investing with the same money manager.

The year 1999 may have marked an early sign that indexing, and the practice
of buying to exploit a stock’s inclusion in an important index, is becoming a
factor in Japanese equity markets.

n index has been introduced for the Prague, Budapest and Warsaw exchanges by
Czech brokerage firm Wood & Co., in conjunction with Reuters Group PLC.

The stock-index wars are heating up: Standard & Poor’s completed its S&P
Global 1200 Index with the release of its UK 150 Index on October 5.

British pension investors are snapping up index funds these days. In the
first half of 1999 local fund manager Legal & General Group PLC reaped the
largest increase in such investment, but the US’ State Street Global Advisors
moved rapidly up to second place behind it.