Miami Business School's Florida 50 Stock Index Posts Gains During First Quarter of 2018

CORAL GABLES, Fla., April 5, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The University of Miami Business School's Florida 50 Index (UMIAMIFL) finished the first quarter of 2018 with a gain of .95 percent, and eleven of its firms saw their stock prices rise by more than 10 percent. The slight 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 2.17 percent and the S&P 1500 by 2.13 percent, both of which experienced small quarterly declines.

The 11 firms in the Florida index that boasted first quarter gains of more than 10 percent are:

HCI Group (+27.63 percent)
FARO Technologies (+24.26 percent)
Universal Insurance Holdings (+16.64 percent)
Harris Corporation (+13.86 percent)
Ruth's Hospitality Group (+12.93 percent)
Ultimate Software Group (+11.67 percent)
Rayonier (+11.22 percent)
United Insurance Holdings (+10.96 percent)
PGT Innovations (+10.68 percent)
International Speedway (+10.66 percent)
SEACOR Holdings (+10.56 percent)

UM'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 University of Miami Business School's Florida 50 Index for the first quarter of 2018 shows that even in a slight down market, 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 Miami Business School and creator of the index.

"The 12 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," he continued.

Seacoast Banking Corporation of Florida (SBCF), a community bank providing financial services and headquartered in Stuart, Florida, recently joined the UM Florida 50 Index thanks to S&P's recent inclusion of this company into its own S&P 1500 Index.

The index is available under ticker symbol UMIAMIFL through the S&P website at: www.UMFL50.com. The performance can be monitored in real time on Yahoo Finance.

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SOURCE University of Miami