Standard & Poor’s Announces Float Adjustment Schedule For S&P 500 And Affiliated Indices

Moving forward on its commitment to bringing the world’s most recognized index to full float adjustment within an 18 month transition period, Standard & Poor’s - the leading provider of independent investment research, ratings and indices - released today the schedule for publication of information on the float adjustment of the S&P 500 and its affiliated U.S. indices.

As previously announced last March, Standard & Poor’s will transition the S&P 500, the S&P MidCap 400, the S&P SmallCap 600 and the S&P REIT Composite indices to 100% full float adjustment, where the share counts of stocks in the index are adjusted to eliminate strategic blocs of stock and cross holdings. The transition will be done in two phases.

On Tuesday, September 28th after the close of trading, Standard & Poor’s will release to the public the following information:

• An overview of Standard & Poor's adoption of full float adjustment for the U.S. indices
• A description of Standard & Poor’s float adjustment methodology for the U.S. indices
• A list of the float factors (percentage of shares outstanding to be included in the indices) for all companies in the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, S&P SmallCap 600 and S&P REIT Composite indices
• An in-depth analysis of the impact of the indices transition to float adjustment
• Question & answer paper clarifying all details of the float adjustment implementation

Beginning on Friday, October 15th, Standard & Poor’s will publish provisional half-float adjusted and full float adjusted indices for its U.S. indices. These series will include history from September 19, 2003. As announced previously and as shown on the diagram below, the schedule for transition to full float is:

• September 2004 – publication of details on Standard & Poor’s Web site www.standardandpoors.com
• March 18th 2005 – Official Standard & Poor’s Indices shift to half float adjusted indices where, for example, a company with an 80% float factor, will be adjusted to a 90% factor - half way from 100% to 80%
• September 16th 2005 – All official U.S. indices shift to full float adjusted

In addition, Standard & Poor’s will release a schedule of teleconferences to address all media and client inquiries approximately one week prior to the September 28th announcements.

Click here to download the schedule.