Index

A number used to compute the interest rate for an adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM). The index is generally a published number or percentage, such as the average interest rate or yield on U.S. Treasury bills. A margin is added to the index to determine the interest rate that will be charged on the ARM. This interest rate is subject to any caps on the maximum or minimum interest rate that may be charged on the mortgage, stated in the note.

A published interest rate compiled from other indicators such as U.S. Treasury bills or the monthly average interest rate on loans closed by savings and loan organizations. Mortgage lenders use the index figure to establish rates on adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs).

The measure of interest rate changes that the lender uses to decide how much the interest rate of an ARM will change over time. No one can be sure when an index rate will go up or down. If a lender bases interest rate adjustments on the average value of an index over time, your interest rate would not be as volatile. You should ask your lender how the index for any ARM you are considering has changed in recent years, and where it is reported.

A statistic that indicates some current economic or financial condition. The term, payment, interest rate, or principal amount of a long-term loan may be adjusted periodically according to a specific index. The index and the manner of adjustment are generally stated in the loan contract.

Statistical measure of the state of the stock market or economy based on the performance of stocks or other components.

A benchmark used in executing investment strategy that is viewed as an independent representation of market performance. An index implicitly assumes cost-free transactions; some assume reinvestment of income.

An index reports changes up or down, usually expressed as points and as a percentage, in a specific financial market, in a number of related markets, or in an economy as a whole.

Each index - and there are a large number of them - measures the market or economy it tracks from a specific starting point. That point might be as recent as the previous day or many years in the past.

For those reasons, indexes are often used as performance benchmarks against which to measure the return of investments that resemble those tracked by the index.

A market index may be calculated arithmetically or geometrically. That's one reason two indexes tracking similar markets may report different results. Further, some indexes are weighted and others are not.

Weighting means giving more significance to some elements in the index than to others. For example, a market capitalization weighted index is more influenced by price changes in the stock of its largest companies than by price changes in the stock of its smaller companies.

The factor that a particular interest rate is directly related to, some common indexes are the One Year Treasury Bills, LIBOR, and the prime lending rate.

The searchable catalog of documents created by search engine software. Also called catalog. Index is often used as a synonym for search engine.

Also Price Index. A representative price usually computed and published by a trade journal or transaction venues (e.g., ICE), using information from actual fixed price transactions. Buyers and sellers not active in a market may transact at a price index that is representative of the market. It is also used by state regulators as a benchmark for distributor pass-through of commodity costs to consumers. Market participants who are active and willing to transact at fixed prices during the trading period, in effect, are the ones forming the index prices. A price index based on large volumes, many transactions and many counterparties, is representative of a liquid and competitive market point, but indices formed at points with few transactions may be less reliable.

See definition for: full-text index. See also: search

1. Special data structure used in a database to speed searching for records in tables or spatial features in geographic data sets.
2. ARC/INFO supports both spatial and attribute indexes. See also item indexing, cross-tile indexing and spatial indexing.

A systematic guide that allows access to specific items contained within a larger body of information

An index is a reverse representation of searchable content using an index of terms occurring in the documents, with a reference to all documents matching a given term.

See full text index.

See Directory. Also refers to the database of web pages maintained by a search engine or directory.

Collection of data used as bank to search through to find a match to a user fed query. The larger search engines have billions of documents in their catalogs. When search engines search they search via reverse indexes by words and return results based on matching relevancy vectors. Stemming and semantic analysis allow search engines to return near matches. Index may also refer to the root of a folder on a web server.

A search engine's database in which it stores textual content from every web page that its spider visits.

The searchable catalog of documents created by search engine software. Also called "catalog." Index is often used as a synonym for search engine. Index is commonly pluralized as "indices." However, Search Engine Watch instead uses the alternative plural form "indexes."