The fund simply aims to track the return of a market benchmark by buying and holding the component stocks.
The country's Sensitive Index, or Sensex, was the worst-performing major stock-market benchmark in the region in 2011, sliding 24.6%.
But this is not a simple task, particularly when it involves assets with risk exposures far into the future and which are traded so rarely that there is no good market benchmark for setting the price.
Thanks to a roaring stock market whose benchmark index was up 53% in the past year and a strong rupee that appreciated 12%, for the first time all Indian rich listers are billionaires.
Tim Lord cited alleged communications from the "31st floor" of Barclays HQ - which housed senior executives - about the benchmark market interest rate.
Brazil's benchmark stock market index, the Bovespa, is hovering around an alltime high, and the economy is booming.
And unlike America, Europe seems keen to use a lax definition of capital that is no longer viewed by the market as the best benchmark for solvency.
Unlike other market data vendors in the fixed income market who aggregate prices supplied by large dealers, Benchmark Solution uses proprietary technology to analyze millions of market inputs and generate prices which are updated every 10 seconds to provide pre-trade pricing intelligence.
Market estimates are for the benchmark Selic rate to end the year at 12.5%.
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In the bond market, the yield on benchmark 10-year Malaysian debt declined 0.03 percentage point to 3.49% at the end of Monday's trading.
Market expectations are for the Selic benchmark interest rate to hit 7.50 percent before the end of the year.
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And since ETFs can only track a benchmark, if the market as a whole isn't doing well, the ETF won't have good returns, either.
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However this is a market where Apple has set the benchmark.
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Similar to low-cost index mutual funds, ETFs track segments of the market and try to match a benchmark stock or bond index rather than beat it.
Year to date the mutual fund is up 2.9 percent, while the MSCI EM, the benchmark for growth emerging market equities, is up just 0.35 percent.
On the market front, yields on Italian benchmark 10-year sovereign bonds hit an all-time high of 6.68%, at one point registering a 490 basis point spread over German bunds.
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Slim-controlled companies, most of them cobbled together into two main holding companies, Grupo Carso and Grupo Financiero Inbursa, account for half of the combined market cap of Mexico's benchmark stock index, the 35-stock Indice de Precios y Cotizaciones.
Gazprom shares--or at least 49% of them--are about to become free-floating, at which point they will suddenly jumped from nil in the benchmark Morgan Stanley Emerging Market Index to 10% of the weighting--the largest single component, likely to edge out even powerhouse Korean electronics manufacturer Samsung .
Like other professional municipal bond investors, I use the Thomson Reuters Municipal Market Monitor (MMD) as a benchmark to make these kinds of assessments.
The Mexican stock market has performed well, with the benchmark IPC index up nearly 13% in 2012 and more than 20% in the last year.
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In addition to the gains among health-care stocks, consumer-staples and telecommunications stocks outpaced the broader benchmark, a reminder to market watchers that the year's gains have been driven mostly by less economically sensitive stocks.
It is a benchmark of large-cap developed market stocks that are domiciled outside the U.S. and Canada.
The price of gold, as measured by the benchmark contract on the Comex futures market, recouped some losses in late April, but still finished down 7.7% for the month and down more than 12% for the year.
"Takeda is a strong competitor in the Japanese market, and is still seen as the benchmark in many respects for domestic companies and multinational companies alike, " says Mark Milton-Edwards, director of business development at AstraZeneca KK (Japan).
With the relaunch of Overdrive PC, Velocity Micro has the most appealing extreme performance desktop option on the market-one of the most powerful, benchmark crushing gaming PCs that money can buy, supported by Velocity Micro's US-based customer care.
The Brazilian real is one of the few emerging-market currencies that is trading well above its Big Mac benchmark.
Indeed, the lack of an Asian corporate bond market is so troublesome that the advantages of a better benchmark may outweigh the Miyazawa subsidies.
On the equity side, compared to the benchmark MSCI Emerging Markets index, global emerging market equity funds were underweight, in order of less weighting, Brazil, China and Russia, and slightly overweight India up to June 11, according to EPFR Global and Barclays.
But the Spanish benchmark has plunged 17%, and the Italian market is down 3%.
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