New York, 17 May 2010

Measures Component Trends Based on the Price Movements of Certain Highly Liquid Futures: Standard & Poor's, the world's leading index provider, has announced the launch of the S&P Commodity Trading Strategy Index ("S&P CTSI").

The Index is designed to quantitatively track the prices of a diversified portfolio of 30 commodity and financial futures contracts. The contracts (also called components) are grouped into sectors, with each sector represented on either a "long" or "short" basis depending on recent leading macroeconomic indicators, market momentum and overall market sentiment.

With the ability to go long or short sectors, the S&P CTSI is designed to capture the economic benefit over long time periods derived from both rising and declining trends within a cross-section of the futures markets. It is also designed as a "tradable" index that is readily accessible to market participants.

"The S&P CTSI was developed to provide an investable index that tracks a diversified portfolio of commodity and financial futures contracts, and to provide a lower volatility alternative to long-only commodity indices," says Michael McGlone, Senior Director of Commodity Indices for S&P Indices. "The Index is also designed to be tradable and readily accessible to market participants."

The S&P CTSI is part of the next generation of Standard & Poor's family of commodity indices targeted mainly to index investors looking for lower volatility exposure to commodity and financial futures markets. The S&P CTSI is calculated and maintained by S&P Indices.

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For more information on the S&P CTSI, including the index methodology visit: www.spgsci.standardandpoors.com