ABSTRACT
On January 29, 1993 the American Stock Exchange (AMEX) began trading what has become one of the most successful new financial products in years, Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts® or SPDRs®, pronounced"spiders", a revolutionary index fund product based on the S&P 500®. In the four plus years since, the SPDR Trust has grown to over $4 billion in assets, and on a typical day approximately 2 million shares worth over $180 million are traded on the Exchange. During 1996, SPDRs were the second most actively traded equity security on the AMEX. The tremendous success of SPDRs has led to the development and listing of a number of similar products. In May, 1995, AMEX began trading MidCap SPDRs™ on the S&P MidCap 400 Index™. Today, the MidCap SPDRs Trust has more than $500 million in assets and was ranked in the top 10 percent of the most actively traded securities on the AMEX in 1996.
