Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) has been added by the MSCI, an equity index provider, to its World Index as a part og reclassifying equities on Wednesday during its semi-annual review, says Reuters. Twitter is one of the major additions to the MSCI All World Index, which will add 58 companies and remove 45 others at the end of the May.
Many changes made to the indexes
Countries like Qatar and United Arab Emirates were reclassified into emerging market status from frontier market status. Qatar will have a 0.47% weighting in the MSCI Emerging Market index, while UAE will have 0.58%
About $8 trillion is benchmarked to MSCI indexes. Year to date, emerging markets indexes were up 2.9% and the world index gained 2.1%.
The new MSCI will include 10 Qatar companies and nine UAE companies in both the all World index and the emerging markets index. Other big companies to be admitted will be Qatar National Bank SAQ, Industries Qatar and National Bank of Abu Dhabi.
Shanghai Raas Blood Products Co Ltd, Shanghai Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone Development Co Ltd and Dongxu Optoelectronic Technology Co Ltd will be included in the MSCI China A index. A total 13 securities will be added to the MSCI China A Index and 33 will be deleted.
Thirteen securities will be added to the MSCI Frontier Markets Index and 30 will be deleted. There will be two big additions from Pakistan, including Pakistan Tobacco Company Ltd and K-Electric Ltd.
Twitter upgraded
Analysts are confident about the growth of Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR), even though shares are down more than 44% this year so far due to declining user growth. Analysts at SunTrust have assigned a price target of $45 and upgraded the stock from Neutral to Buy on Monday. According to analyst Robert Peck, Twitter Inc is similar to Facebook, LinkedIn and Amazon all of which have a long runway in its core business.
Peck also said that comparison of Facebook and Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) is not fair, and that the micro-blogging stock will be profitable even if it does not rise to the level of Facebook. The analyst thinks that users have neglected some of the positive developments in the company. Analyst added that the company has other market alternatives such as e-commerce and real-time search. Recently, Twitter introduced a new feature called ‘Mute’ through which users can block the posts of other users that they do not want to view.
