Stiching Sensex
In recent months, the Sensex has created headline after headline as it has marched seemingly unstoppable from 15,000 to 16,000 to 19,000 and, for a brief moment, 20,000.
Even people who don't follow stock markets closely may have a pretty good idea of the Sensex value. But what exactly is the Sensex? And what can indices like the Sensex and Nifty tell you about stock market movements?
What is a stock-market index?
A stock-market index is simply a convenient summary of market prices. There are thousands of stocks whose prices fluctuate up and down every day.
An index helps make sense of this chaos and gives you a single number which tells you how well the market is performing compared with earlier periods. The basic idea is to select a small number of stocks which are considered representative and important and calculate the index based on the prices of those stocks.