Crisil launches gold index

With growing importance of gold as an investment asset class,CRISIL launched the first gold index in the country on Monday that will track the performance of gold price in the Indian market and will act as a benchmark for performance evaluation of investment products that have gold as underlying.

The index value will represent the rupee denominated landed price of 10 grams of gold in Mumbai and the index value for a particular day will be updated on the Crisil website at 8PM in the evening.

The index has a base date of Jan 2,2007. Crisil expects all gold exchange traded funds and fund of funds to use the index as the benchmark. As of now,gold ETFs in India benchmark their performance to the price of gold on the domestic commodity exchanges or local bullion market and the practice leads to inconsistency.