The Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index, also known as the Wilshire 5000, is a stock market index that is designed to measure the value of all publicly traded companies in the United States. The index is named for originally including approximately all 5,000 U.S. publicly traded companies when if was first introduced in 1974. Due to changes in the number of publicly traded companies overtime the index now only includes around 3,500 companies today.
The index was created to measure the total performance of the U.S. stock market by including all publicly traded companies listed on the NYSE, NASDAQ, and AMEX exchanges. The index is considered one of the most broad and comprehensive representative stock market indices in the world and is often used as a benchmark for the overall performance of the U.S. stock market.
The Wilshire 5000 is a market capitalization weighted index. The index’s value is derived from total market capitalization of all stocks listed in the US Stock market. It is difficult to determine a specific point value of the index to a market capitalization dollar amount as that relationship changes frequently. However, a change in the value of the index as a percentage will provide you with the relative change in the entire stock market capitalization. For example, if the index changes in value by 5% this translates to an overall change in market capitalization of all US Stocks by an average of 5%.
The Wilshire Associates, the company that calculates the index, sometimes makes adjustments to the index to improve its accuracy, such as adjusting for stock splits, mergers, acquisitions as well as additions and subtractions of publicly traded companies. Note that the index is not adjusted for dividends unlike the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA).
The Index’s all time high was 48,952.51 which it reached in November 2021.