Dow Jones and Standard & Poor's both released stock indices yesterday that monitor Gulf markets. It indicated increasing interest in the region's equities markets around the world. Investors are gradually looking towards the east to position their investments as established markets in the West. As oil prices break new records and domestic companies expand into international powerhouses, the GCC has emerged as a lucrative destination for foreign dollars. Well-established indices are a sign that these markets are maturing, and they may attract more foreign investment.

It’s a piece of fantastic news for the country," said Jahangir Aka, a senior executive officer at SEI, a Dubai-based asset management company. This offers sets standards, visibility, and a reference point for foreign asset managers. The Dow Jones GCC Index and the Dow Jones Islamic Market GCC Index are the first steps in a larger movement in the region by Dow Jones. It also plans to launch a GCC Titans 40 index in July or August to chart the region's largest companies, in addition to the indexes revealed yesterday. Indices for individual GCC nations, as well as sectors such as finance and manufacturing, are under the process of implementation.

The majority of revenue for indexing agencies including Dow Jones, S&P, MSCI Barra, and FTSE comes from licensing deals with fund managers that use index figures as a benchmark to assess their success and promote their services. Big names like Dow Jones and S&P add status to the country's growing markets, which could pique interest even more. Dow Jones also announced yesterday that, starting on October 1, it would include the UAE, Oman, and Qatar in its Dow Jones Wilshire Global Index family, which is mainly used by US investors. This could have an impact on the UAE's capital markets. In March, Bahrain and Kuwait were added to the indexes.

This comes after MSCI, the world's leading emerging markets index, suggested that the UAE and other Gulf countries might be added to its key developing world index. All these ties in with the sense that the UAE is gaining broader acceptance among benchmark index providers, HSBC analyst John Lomax affirms. The UAE owns 30 companies in the Dow Jones GCC Index, accounting for around 22% of the index's market capitalization. Dubai Ports World, Emaar Properties, Du, and other major companies open to foreign investment are among them. Kuwaiti firms weighted heavily in the index, almost 52 percent.

The UAE dominates the S&P GCC 40 Ranking, with 12 companies accounting for 35 percent of the index's weighting. Kuwait is in second place, with 12 companies accounting for 30% of the index. Dow Jones had revealed new indexes weeks before they were to be published, but S&P had given no hint that a new GCC index was on the way until they announced it yesterday. On this, Sumeet Nihalani, who is senior director of sales for the Asia Pacific and the Middle East region at Dow Jones, surprisingly tweets, “We had no clue,that it was happening on the same day too”.