Wilshire 5000 - History

History

• The Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index was established by the Wilshire Associates in 1974, naming it for the approximate number of issues it included at the time. It was renamed the "Dow Jones Wilshire 5000" in April 2004, after Dow Jones & Company assumed responsibility for its calculation and maintenance. On March 31, 2009 the partnership with Dow Jones was concluded and the index returned to Wilshire Associates.

• The base value for the index was 1404.60 points on base date December 31, 1980, when it had a total market capitalization of $1,404.596 billion. On that date, each one-index-point change in the index was equal to $1 billion. However, index divisor adjustments due to corporate actions and index composition changes have changed the relationship over time, so that by 2005 each index point reflected a change of about $1.2 billion in the index’s total market capitalization.

• The index did not close above its March 24, 2000 peak above 14,000 points (record high of the 20th century) until February 20, 2007, and a hypothetical investment in the Wilshire 5000, made at the 2000 peak and with subsequent dividends reinvested, did not become profitable on a closing basis until October 3, 2006.

• On April 20, 2007, the index closed above 15,000 for the first time. On that day, the S&P 500 was still several percentage points below its March 2000 high, because small cap issues absent from the S&P 500 and included in the Wilshire 5000 outperformed the large cap issues that dominate the S&P 500 during the cyclical bull market.

• The index reached its all-time high on October 9, 2007 at the 15,806.69 point level, right before the onset of the late-2000s recession and the related late-2000s financial crisis.

• Since late 2007, the expansion of subprime lending difficulties into a wider Financial Crisis, plunged the United States into a renewed bear market that accelerated beginning on September 15, 2008. On October 8, the Wilshire 5000 closed below 10,000 for the first time since 2003.

• The index continued trading downward towards a 13-year low reaching the 6,772 level on March 6, 2009, representing a loss of about $10.9 trillion in market capitalization from its highs in 2007; but has since rallied above the 15,000 level on September 7, 2012.

• The Wilshire 5000 gained approximately $2.5 trillion in market value during the first 11 months of 2009 while the index rose 2,105 points. Therefore, as of November 2009, each index point represented about $1.2 billion in market value.