Word: indexers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
These increases have stunned benefits managers, who believed health costs were finally starting to moderate. After all, medical care inflation, which was running at double-digit levels in the early 1980s, was just 5.8% last year. That was not much more than the 4.4% rise in the Consumer Price Index...
...billed as the high-tech investment strategy of the decade. Using computerized trading in esoteric investment vehicles like stock-index futures, the technique promised managers of pension funds or any other kind of investment pool the Wall Street equivalent of the Holy Grail: "insurance" for their portfolios against future downturns in the stock market. As the Dow Jones industrial average kept climbing to new highs through much of 1987, the value of the funds covered by so-called portfolio insurance swelled to an estimated $80 billion...
Enter stock-index futures. These are speculative instruments, traded mostly in the pits of the Chicago commodity exchanges, that allow investors to bet on the direction the stock market is headed without having to buy the stocks themselves. Cheaper and easier to trade than traditional securities, stock- index futures seemed to the budding portfolio insurers like a hedge made in heaven. Rather than sell stocks when prices start to fall, clients could hold the stocks and sell stock-index futures instead. If the market kept falling, income from the sale of the futures would offset much of the losses...
...York Stock Exchange announced an experimental ban on certain computer trades when the Dow rises or falls 75 points or more in a single day. Moreover, both the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange have imposed daily limits on how much the prices of stock-index futures can fluctuate. But even the Brady task force says it would prefer to let the marketplace make its own decision about portfolio insurance, rather than try to ban it outright. As Robert Gordon, president of Twenty-First Securities, puts it, "You can't outlaw a strategy...
Congress is also pondering what action to take. Next month the Senate Banking Committee and the House Telecommunications Subcommittee will conduct hearings on the crash. For one thing, the committees may look into charges that trading in futures contracts based on the Major Market Index, a basket of 20 blue-chip stocks, was manipulated by several major investors on Oct. 20 to trigger an artificial rally in the stock market. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission investigated the accusation and found no evidence of wrongdoing, but the issue will not go away. Says one Senate Banking Committee staffer: "We want...