MarketGrader Featured Index:
The Barron’s 400 Index
Two Decades of Partnership. One Purpose-Built Benchmark.
In 2005, Barron’s—the iconic investing publication—was preparing to launch Barron’s Online as a standalone digital platform, independent from WSJ.com. With financial data becoming widely accessible online, Barron’s saw an opportunity: pair their award-winning journalism with a powerful quantitative tool that could evaluate stocks based on company fundamentals.
Enter MarketGrader
After reviewing our GARP + Quality methodology—available then through our own subscription service—Barron’s chose MarketGrader as its analytical partner. Together, we launched StockGrader in 2006, allowing subscribers to grade any U.S. stock using MarketGrader’s 24-variable, fundamentals-driven system. For Barron’s readers, it brought objective analysis to complement editorial insights. For MarketGrader, it was the start of a lasting partnership grounded in a shared belief in disciplined investing.
From Research to Index Innovation
Around the same time, MarketGrader had been building smart beta indexes rooted in our fundamental selection process. Recognizing the strength of our approach, Dow Jones Indexes, a sister company to Barron’s at the time, proposed a three-way collaboration: create a new kind of U.S. equity index that would rival traditional benchmarks—driven not by size but by financial substance.
The result was the Barron’s 400 Index, introduced on the cover of Barron’s on September 3, 2007.
The Method: Quality at Scale
The Barron’s 400 selects the top 400 U.S. companies every March and September based on their MarketGrader overall grade. Eligible companies must:
- Have a market cap above $250 million
- Not be classified as REITs
- Pass liquidity and sector diversification screens (no sector may exceed 20% of the index)
The index is published in two versions:
- Equally Weighted: Used by active allocators and benchmarked against the Russell MidCap Index
- Market Cap Weighted: Suited for passive replication, benchmarked against the S&P 500
The Performance: Consistently Ahead
The Barron’s 400 Index has demonstrated real value for investors:
Its consistent outperformance reflects the strength of its foundation: a transparent, rules-based methodology focused on long-term value creation.
Hypothetical growth of $100 invested in the Barron’s 400 Index or any of the select benchmarks displayed in the chart, starting on September 3, 2007. All values are based on cumulative total returns through August 29, 2025. One cannot invest in an index. Data sources: FactSet (benchmarks), LSEG and MarketGrader (Barron’s 400 Index).
Hypothetical growth of $100 invested in the Barron’s 400 Index or any of the select benchmarks displayed in the chart, starting on September 3, 2007. All values are based on cumulative total returns through August 29, 2025. One cannot invest in an index. Data sources: FactSet (benchmarks), LSEG and MarketGrader (Barron’s 400 Index).
Conclusion
The Barron’s 400 isn’t just a benchmark—it’s a testament to how editorial insight, rigorous research, and disciplined index construction can converge to help investors capture the best of the U.S. equity market.
