Stock market index

[10] The Wilshire 4500 and Wilshire 5000 indices have five versions each: full capitalization total return, full capitalization price, float-adjusted total return, float-adjusted price, and equal weight.

[18] Other ethical stock market indices may be based on diversity weighting (Fernholz, Garvy, and Hannon 1998).

In 2010, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation announced the initiation of a stock index that complies with Sharia's ban on alcohol, tobacco and gambling.

Indeed, the seeming "seal of approval" of an ethical index may put investors more at ease, enabling scams.

One response to these criticisms is that trust in the corporate management, index criteria, fund or index manager, and securities regulator, can never be replaced by mechanical means, so "market transparency" and "disclosure" are the only long-term-effective paths to fair markets.

Theory might suggest that returns would be lower since the investible universe is artificially reduced and with it portfolio efficiency.

On the other hand, companies with good social performances might be better run, have more committed workers and customers, and be less likely to suffer reputation damage from incidents (oil spillages, industrial tribunals, etc.)

A comparison of three major U.S. stock indices: the NASDAQ Composite , Dow Jones Industrial Average , and S&P 500 Index . All three have the same height at March 2007. The NASDAQ spiked during the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, a result of the large number of technology companies on that index.