Indexes are meant to be measuring sticks. They give us a sense of where markets have been and where they stand today. The original stock market indexes did exactly that. Charles Dow, co-founder of Dow Jones & Co., first published an index of 11 stocks--nine of which were railroad companies--in his "Customer's Afternoon Letter" on July 3, 1884. The index was a measure of the stock price performance of the firms that formed the foundation of the U.S. economy at that time.Fast forward nearly 135 years and a lot has changed. Dow's first index was a flop. His next was a hit. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, launched in 1896, still occupies prime real estate on the masthead ofThe Wall Street Journal (the successor to Dow's "Customer's Afternoon Letter") and is piped through a variety of media that would be unrecognizable to its cre… Full Story

In September 2018, Invesco launched a suite of five "Strategic" exchange-traded funds. These new funds track benchmarks that were developed by Invesco's internal index group, which was formed in 2017. The new lineup builds on the company's legacy as a pioneer in offering non-market-cap-weighted approaches to building index portfolios. Here, I'll take a closer look at the methodology behind these new indexes and compare them to their closest cousins within the Invesco stable.A Brief History LessonInvesco, by way of its 2006 acquisition of the ETF sponsor formerly known as PowerShares, was among the first ETF providers to offer funds tracking indexes that weight their stocks based on something other than market capitalization. Guggenheim, whose ETF business Invesco acquired in 2018, was the first. It was actually Ryde… Full Story