Ocean Tomo today introduced an investible intellectual property stock index, called the Ocean Tomo 300 Patent index, said Keith Cardoza, managing director. The index, based on the value of corporate intellectual property, is made up of 300 global companies that trade on U.S. markets, own U.S. patents for valuable innovations and technologies and have the highest patent value relative to their tangible book value, he said.
"It's meant to be a broad-based diversified index," said Mr. Cardoza, who created the index. "It is the first index that represents the knowledge economy we are in."
The index has a market capitalization of $7 trillion and offers growth and value and large-cap and small-cap size equity subindexes, Mr. Cardoza said.
Claymore Securities is seeking to launch an exchange-traded fund that would track the patent index, pending approval of registration filed this month with the SEC, said David Cohen, managing director-new product engineering at Claymore.
The index returned an annualized 11.69% in a backtest for the 10 years ended Sept. 30, compared with the S&P 500's annualized return of 8.59%, he said. The Ocean Tomo index has the same beta as the S&P 500.
In 2007, Ocean Tomo plans to introduce a global stock index based on brands and another index based on copyrights, both forms of intellectual property, Mr. Cardoza added.
