Best's Review now features insurance stock indices.

A.M. Best is pleased to publish a series of exclusive stock indices that will provide readers with a useful benchmark for assessing investor confidence in the insurance industry.

Best's Insurance Stock Indices include five business segment indices--Multi-Line, Property/Casualty, Life, Health & HMOs, and Brokers & Agents--and a Composite Index. The population consists of all companies traded on U.S. stock exchanges for which the primary business is insurance, with a proviso. A key feature to all but the Brokers & Agents Index is that the lead operating insurer for each company must have an interactive Best's Rating.

To ensure that the indices accurately reflect the performance of each business segment, the prices of their combined 138 stocks are weighted for their respective market capitalizations. At present, market capitalization of the Composite Index tops $1 trillion, with the aggregate weightings of the stocks in the component indices breaking out as: Multi-Line (21%), Property/Casualty (34%), Life (19%), Health & HMO (22%) and Brokers &Agents (4%).

Each of the A.M. Best indices was set initially at Dec. 31, 2004 = 1,000. Typically, the index value published in Best's Review is for the market close on the Thursday before the magazine goes to press.

Regular reporting will highlight monthly, annual and year-to-date performance of the various indices, the top five and bottom five performing individual stocks in the latest four-week period, and charts of the last five weeks of movement in each index.