Perhaps the Financial Times’ greatest contribution to investment statistics has been its pioneering of stock market indices. The oldest and most familiar of these is the FT Ordinary Share Index, also known as the FT-30 share index, or simply the FT Index. It is the oldest continuous index covering UK equities. Started in 1935, it is compiled from the share prices of thirty leading UK companies chosen as representative of UK industry as a whole, it is calculated as a geometric mean. It is biased towards major industrial and retailing companies, the traditional blue chips, and more recently expanded to include financial and oil stocks which have become increasingly important.
Ordinary share - The movements of the FT index over the past 5 trading days, together with its level a year ago, and the values and dates of its highs and lows for the current year.
Yields and ratios – Ordinary dividend yield and price/earnings ratios on a net and nil basis. In the same way that the index reflects prices of its component shares, so these reflect the dividends and earnings of the related companies.
Ordinary share hourly changes – The hourly movements of the FT index through the previous trading day plus the day’s high and low point of the index. This data is available as a real-time index.
Trading volume – The figures for SEAQ bargains are the number of transactions of equities and gilts on the Stock Exchange’s SEAQ trading system by 4.30pm on the five most recent trading days, and also a year earlier. Equity turnover is the value of the volume of equities traded in millions of pounds sterling.
Equity bargains – The number of transactions.
Shares traded – The actual number of shares to have changed hands, quoted in millions.
As with trading volume on individual shares, all volume figures should be divided by two since each share is recorded twice as being both bought and sold.
The FT-30 was for decades the standard barometer of investor sentiment, although it has now been superseded by the FT-SE 100 as the key and most widely quoted index. Nevertheless, it still has a role to play and can be used by analysts to measure the impact on the market of major events such as the outbreak of wars or surprise election results.
The mathematical structure of the index and the fact that it is unweighted
(i.e. all shares counting equally regardless of their market capitalisation)
make the FT-30 a sensitive short-term indicator of market mood. However it
has a downward bias over the long term, making it unsuitable for measuring
market levels or the performance of an investment portfolio over time.