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4.6. Why isn't there an index comparable to the Dow Jones Industrial Index which summarizes the performance of the market?

For roughly the same reasons as the commodity futures exchanges don't create such an index. It would combine unrelated things. In many cases, adding claims together would end up always producing a constant value (e.g. the sum of the probabilities that party X would control congress, that party Y would control congress, and that neither X nor Y would control congress, will always add up to 1).

There may be some value in creating selective indices, such as one that sums up which political party the market expects will do a better job of accomplishing generally agreed upon goals, but it will take a fair amount of thought to do this in an unbiased fashion.

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