Featured Companies Meet Specific Criteria
The 1,000 companies on the Shareholder Scoreboard are major players in their industries and should be of significant interest to investors. With a total market capitalization of $11.384 trillion, they represent more than 90% of the market value of all publicly traded U.S. stocks as measured by the Wilshire 5000.</br></br>The Scoreboard companies were selected by L.E.K. Consulting using a careful screening process. It began with the 725 U.S. stocks included at the end of 1998 in the Dow Jones Global Indexes, a family of world-wide stock-market indexes calculated by Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal. L.E.K. eliminated six stocks that hadn't traded for at least a year, producing a list of 719 companies across 94 industries.</br></br>Next, L.E.K. added another 281 corporations, based on market capitalization, that weren't included in the Dow Jones Global Indexes. Again, these companies had to have traded for at least a year; mutual funds were excluded.</br></br>Since the Scoreboard is meant to track stocks incorporated and trading in the U.S., American depositary receipts and foreign stocks -- including shares of companies such as DaimlerChrysler AG that are incorporated abroad but trade in both U.S. and overseas markets -- were generally excluded. But companies were included if, like Carnival Corp., they are incorporated elsewhere but trade primarily or exclusively on U.S. exchanges.</br></br>The additional 281 companies were selected by relying on data from Dow Jones and Media General Financial Services Inc., a unit of Media General Inc., Richmond, Va.