“Deutsche Börse is proud of our DAX's success as a blue-chip index over the last 25 years. Even in turbulent times the DAX stood as an independent, objective and neutral benchmark. We will pay attention to it in the future as well,” said Reto Francioni, CEO of Deutsche Börse.
A 100 EUR investment in the DAX would be worth almost 800 EURO today. The DAX measures the development of the 30 largest and most liquid companies on the German equities market and represents around 80 percent of the free-float market capitalization in Germany. Launched on July 1, 1988, the DAX is the flagship index of Deutsche Börse and Germany’s leading equity index.
“We have worked to continuously maintain and extend the DAX index family since its introduction. Its success can be attributed to our fully rules-based and transparent approach to developing indices. Today, DAX is one of the world’s leading indices to underlie financial products, signifying its importance to the global financial community,” said Hartmut Graf, chief executive officer, STOXX Limited. STOXX Ltd. is the marketing agent for the indices of Deutsche Börse AG and SIX, including the DAX and SMI indices.
DAX is one of the most popular underlyings worldwide. In 2012, DAX futures and options achieved 91 million traded contracts. It currently serves as the basis for more than 200,000 financial products worldwide.
In terms of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), two of the top 3 European ETFs use DAX as underlying: The iShares DAX ETF is the biggest European ETF in terms of AUM (AUM end of May 2013: EUR 14.4 Bn). The db x-Trackers DAX ETF is the third largest European ETF in terms of AUM (AUM end of May 2013: EUR 7.3 Bn) In total, there are seven ETFs on the DAX index.
Year to date, the DAX is up 4.6% as of June 28, 2013. The index has also reached several record closing and intraday highs this year. The most recent all-time high was 8557.86 on 22 May 2013, while the closing high is 8530.89, also on 22 May 2013.
More information can be found at www.dax-indices.com.