Merrill Lynch Strategist Offers 10 Candidates To Join S&P 500 - Report
Newstraders - December 03, 1998 14:05
(NewsTraders.com)-- Over the next six months slots will open up in the
Standard Poor's 500 Index due to mergers and acquisition activity, which
has Wall Street analysts and investors speculating on who will be
invited to join the broad market measure, according to a story on
Individual Investor Online.
Merrill Lynch equity derivatives strategist Diane Garnick has found that
from 1990 to 1997, every time it was announced that a company would be
added to the SP 500, the stock outperformed the index by 1.9% the
following day. In 1998, new additions outperformed the index by 2.5%.
From the day following the announcement on through the close of trading
on the day they were included in the benchmark, the 1990-1997 newbies
beat the index by 3.2% and the 1998 group outperformed it by 4.3%.
But when the neophytes were in the SP for 30 days, they underperformed
the index by 2.8% in 1990-1997 and 8.7% in 1998, Merrill Lynch found.
Garnick says the best place to search the new additions is the top 40
companies of the SP MidCap group, which ranks firms by market
capitalization.
Garnick's top-10 candidates: America Online (AOL), Compuware (CPWR),
Aflac (AFL), Office Depot (ODP), Crestar Financial (CF), Solectron
(SLR), McKesson (MCK), Cadence Design (CDN), Harley-Davidson (HDI), and
Southtrust (SOTR).
Copyright 1998 NewsTraders Inc. All Rights Reserved Thursday, December
03, 1998 |
