About the Dark Side Index

I know many people like to track economic activity by market indexes like the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) or the Standard and Poor's 500 (S&P 500), etc. For investing in or tracking an entire sector the popular method is to use Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). These funds try to mimic the activity of an entire industry. For example United States Oil Fund (USO) is an ETF that buys oil based options and oil futures. Thus its value tracks the oil industry as a whole.

With the transition from Bush to Obama many people anticipate a period of enlightenment similar to Europe coming out of the Dark Ages. But how will we objectively tell if there is a difference?

This is where my new market index comes in. I call it the Dark Side Index (DSI). The DSI has ten categories each represented by a single company. The categories are weighted and the stock values are normalized so that the index value was 100 on January 10, 2009. Here are the companies making up the DSI:

Halliburton ( Oil and Gas Muscle)
Philip Morris ( Nicotine Addiction)
Bally (Gambling)
Kyokuyo (Whale Meat)
Firestone Diamonds (African Diamond Mining)
Huaneng Power ( worlds most polluting company)
BAE Systems (Arms Exporter)
Diageo ( Alcohol Dealer)
Nestle (Child Slave Labor)
New Frontier Media (Porn Videos)

Notes: I would like to add a cyber crime category to the DSI but the obvious representative, Russian Business Network (RBN), is not publicly traded. Diamond mining company De Beers went private a few years ago so I had to settle for Firestone.