Numbers & facts

SPtrading puts in your hands the power of a methodology that has been developed by and for professional traders. With one trading signal at the beginning of each session and one at its end, our trading methodology will free you from minute-by-minute scrutiny of the market. The pattern recognition approach will help anticipate market moves rather than lag them, and the high frequency of trades - typically one every other day - will lower the risk associated with each individual transaction.

Our trading system is designed exclusively for the Cash, Futures and E-mini S&P 500® stock index, and has been available via the Internet since 1998.

In 1957, Standard & Poor Corporation® put together in its original form the S&P 500® which is a capitalization weighted basket of 500 companies. What this means is that each of the companies influences the price of the index according to the value of the firm's outstanding shares. As of December 31, 2002, the S&P 500® index represented about 70% of all US publicly traded companies in various sectors of the economy and in the following proportions (*):

S&P 500® Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) Sectors As of December 31, 2002
	Number of Cos.	% of Market Capitalization
Consumer Discretionary	88	13.4
Consumer Staples	34	9.5
Energy	23	6.0
Financials	81	20.5
Health Care	47	14.9
Industrials***	67	11.5
Information Technology	77	14.3
Materials	34	2.8
Telecommunication Services	12	4.2
Utilities	37	2.9

The Exchanges represented in the index are:

S&P 500® Exchange Representation
	Number of Cos.	% of Market Capitalization
NYSE	424	85.7
NASDAQ	74	14.1
AMEX	2	0.2

The Median share price of the 500 companies of the index was $28.695, and the total market value of the index,was, in December 2002, USD 8.107 trillion. (*)

The S&P 500® futures have been trading on the largest futures exchange in the US, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) since April 1982 and in September 1997, the CME introduced the Electronic Mini (E-Mini) S&P 500®. With 7,494 contracts traded on September 9, 1997 and over 1,000,000 contracts traded on March 13th, 2003, the E-mini is by far the fastest growing product in the CME history. (**)