down and down (2010-2011)

It's not a pretty picture when you chart this thing. Below are around 20 of the 33 stocks charted over the last 18months and in order of weighting per capitalisation.

Only 5 of these stocks had a positive change in value over the last 12months, and as you can see the impact of those changes is nothing compared with the negatives in everything else. 

Why have I only charted 21? only because I haven't had time to pull down all the data for the others and I starting to see a certain impact that I thought I should write about. As you can see, the slice of the pie gets smaller and smaller, to the point where more than half of the companies in the index make up less than 1% each of the total index. Hence, even if their share price doubles, the impact on the index would be just 1%. 

I guess this is a well known effect in indicies - just as the ASX200 is dominated by the big four banks and BHP, the index below would be dominated by the biggest companies in the renewable sector.

I don't think there is any way that the last twelve months could be anything but negative (here around 50% of value is lost in 12months), but I still wonder if there isn't another way to build the index so the largest companies don't dominate quite so heavily. Given that almost none of the companies were paying dividends, it isn't an advantage to preference companies with a larger capitalisation from that point of view, and the smaller companies may have a higher chance of being the 'next big thing' if they strike it lucky with the technology they are working with (or the market sector they are in) and if they are all sitting below 1%, then the clean-tech-index investor isn't going to share in that windfall.

Anyway, off to download more data...