Miami Business School’s Florida 50 Index (UMIAMIFL) finished the first quarter of 2019 with a gain of 14.89%, and twelve of its firms saw their stock prices rise by more than 20%. The modest gain in the Florida index, which tracks all Florida-based firms in the S&P Composite 1500® Index, edged out the broader S&P 500 by 1.82% and the S&P 1500 by 1.81%, both of which also experienced moderate increases. The stock market logged its best quarterly advance since 2009, and it notched its best start to a year since 1998.
The twelve firms in the Florida index which boasted first-quarter gains of over 20% were:
- TopBuild Corp – BLD (+44.04%)
- World Fuel Services – INT (+34.94%)
- Marriott Vacations Worldwide – VAC (+32.61%)
- Norwegian Cruise Lines – NCLH (+29.65%)
- Ryder System – R (+28.74%)
- Roper Technologies – ROP (+28.31%)
- Rayonier Advanced Materials – RYAM (+27.32%)
- Lennar Corp – LEN (+25.39%)
- Tech Data Corp – TECD (+25.18%)
- SBA Communications – SBAC (+23.33%)
- Darden Restaurants – DRI (+21.64%)
- CSX Corp – CSX (+20.42%)
The University of Miami’s Florida 50 Index, which was established by the Miami Business School in 2016, is based on the capitalizations of all Florida-based large-, mid- and small-cap companies included in the S&P 1500 index having common stock listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ. It is the very first custom S&P Dow Jones index to be owned by a university and the only index that focuses solely on public companies headquartered in an individual U.S. state.
“The performance of the Miami Business School’s Florida 50 Index for the first quarter of 2019 shows that even in a market that has rebounded nicely from the fourth quarter of 2018, Florida-based firms as a cross-section are more than keeping pace with their counterparts across the country,” said Seth Levine, CPA, an accounting lecturer at the School and creator of the index.
“The twelve largest companies in the Florida 50 Index have a combined market capitalization of over $300 billion. Florida’s GDP, which is just shy of $1 trillion, rivals that of countries like Spain and Mexico, and thus investors would do well to keep an eye on this index in the future as they weigh their own investment decisions.”
The index is available under ticker symbol UMIAMIFL, is calculated by S&P Dow Jones Custom Indices, and its performance can be monitored in real-time via Yahoo Finance.
