Standard & Poor’s (S&P), global provider of independent credit ratings, indices and research data, launched a new special index designed to follow the development of emerging markets’ companies, including Bulgarian ones, Thomson Financial news service said on October 22, as quoted by Dnevnik daily.

The indicator was called S&P Select Frontier Index and was the first one to cover a wide range of emerging economies in Europe, Asia, South America and the Middle East. It was a kind of a sub-index in the group of S&P Extended Frontier 150 Index.

This was another international product, whose pool was to cover Bulgaria’s capital market. This country’s market of securities and other financial instruments was also included in indices of one of then largest players in the global trading – STOXX, which was a joint venture of Deutsche Börse, Dow Jones and the Swiss stock exchange SWX Group, Dnevnik said.

S&P Select Frontier Index would have 30 of the biggest and most liquid companies from smaller economies and lesser developed capital markets that were typical for emerging markets. In addition to Bulgaria, the index initially includes also companies fro Cambodia, Columbia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Panama, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Vietnam. The largest share of the index at the beginning was given to businesses from Pakistan (28.97 per cent), followed by the UAE and Panama. Bulgaria had only one company forming the index, giving a 1.05 per cent share of its value, Dnevnik said. The company was not named.