🇺🇸S&P 500 today

The S&P 500 tracks the shares of 500 of the largest publicly traded US companies — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia and peers. It has been calculated by S&P Dow Jones Indices since 1957 and alone represents roughly 80% of the market value of the US stock market.

By concentrating the largest companies of the largest market in the world, it became the global benchmark for equities. When a manager says they "beat the market", they usually mean the S&P 500.

Like the Ibovespa, it is measured in points — and in dollars. For an investor whose money lives in reais that means two sources of return, and of risk: how the companies do, and where the exchange rate goes. A year in which the index gains 10% in dollars but the real appreciates 15% ends in the red in local currency.

Each company's weight follows its free-float adjusted market value. It is not a simple average: a US$3 trillion company moves the index far more than a US$20 billion one.

A committee decides who joins and who leaves — it is not an automatic ranking. Criteria include minimum market value, liquidity, US domicile and profitability in recent quarters.

In recent years the index has become heavily concentrated in technology: the few largest companies account for a growing share of the total. Buying the S&P 500 today means, in practice, large exposure to a handful of tech giants.

From Brazil, without opening an account abroad, the most direct route is the IVVB11 ETF BDR, traded on B3 in reais — it tracks the index and embeds the dollar move. It is bought through a broker like any stock.

There are also local funds at Brazilian banks and brokers replicating the index, and the route of a brokerage account abroad, which gives access to the original ETFs (such as VOO and SPY), usually with lower fees but with remittance paperwork and its own tax treatment.

Mind the exchange rate: when the dollar is historically expensive against the real, each real buys less index. That factor matters as much as the price of US stocks.