STANDARD & POOR'S

Standard & Poor's Corporation (S&P) is the largest statistical service organization in the United States. It specializes in the securities field and includes a range of corporate investments, like stocks, bonds, mortgages, notes, scrip, rights, options, etc. Standard & Poor's Corporation (a division of the McGraw-Hill Companies in the 1990s) is the result of a merger between the Standard Statistics Company and Poor's Publishing Company. The Standard & Poor's Corporation, known by its trademarks "Standard & Poor's," "S&P," and "S&P 500, " produces for investors useful collections of periodic reference publications containing financial statistics. S&P services include a weekly investment advisory service, a stock guide, a bond guide, industry surveys, and corporation records, as well as many other specifically targeted economic marketplace service sector guides. S&P has for many years produced its famous S&P 500 Corporate Stock Index in which 500 important companies, producing various large company or "blue chip" commodities, are averaged together with weights representing their importance in the total indexed selling value of their stocks. This index represents an aggregate view of the primary marketplace in the United States and illustrates statistical trends in both growth and weakness. The Index presents an ongoing series of statistical "snapshots" of the market to aid investors. The only real competitor of S&P as a leading publisher of investment data is Moody's Investor Service, Inc.