Perfomance index

4 Mar 2018

The Performance indicator or a more familiar term, KPI (key performance indicator),
is an industry term that measures the performance. Generally used by organizations,
they determine whether the company is successful or not, and the degree of success.
It is used on a business’ different levels, to quantify the progress or regress of a
department, of an employee or even of a certain program or activity. For a manager
it’s extremely important to determine which KPIs are relevant for his activity, and
what is important almost always depends on which department he wants to measure the
performance for. So the indicators set for the financial team will be different than
the ones for the marketing department and so on.

Similar to the KPIs companies use to measure their performance on a monthly, quarterly
and yearly basis, the stock market makes use of a performance indicator as well, although
on the market, the performance index is calculated on a daily basis. The stock market
performance indicates the direction of the stock market as a whole, or of a specific stock
and gives traders an overall impression over the future security prices, helping them decide
the best move. A change in the indicator gives information about future trends a stock could
adopt, information about a sector or even on the whole economy. The financial sector is the
most relevant department of the economy and the indicators provide information on its overall
health, so when a stock price moves upwards, the indicators are a signal of good news. On the
other hand, if the price of a particular stock decreases, that is because bad news about its
performance are out and they generate negative signals to the market, causing the price to go
downwards. One could state that the movement of the security prices and consequently, the movement
of the indicators are an overall evaluation of a country’s economic trend.