Business and Personal Finance Dictionary

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• NASDAQ COMPOSITE INDEX
  
  This index tracks the prices of all of the securities traded on the Nasdaq Stock Market (Nasdaq), which makes it a broader measure of market activity than the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) or Standard & Poor's 500-stock Index (S&P 500). The index is market capitalization-weighted, which means that companies whose market values are higher exert greater influence on the movement of the index. Market value, or capitalization, is computed by multiplying the most recent sales price times the total number of outstanding shares. So, for example, if a stock with 1 million outstanding shares increased $3 in value, it would have a greater impact on the index than a stock that also increased $3 in value but had only 500,000 outstanding shares. The index is updated throughout the trading day.
  
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