How differently do our non-large companies listed on the Portuguese Stock Exchange perform?

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Economics from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Behind the glamour of the largest and more mature companies listed on Stock Exchanges all over the world there is a much larger segment of companies also listed that tend to perform differently from the most visible ones. This visibility is also magnified by the fact that those large companies are part of the sample indices computed for most markets in order to translate the entire listed market with a small but manageable sample of companies. However, on many exchanges new indices have been created to place the different segments of the remaining listed market – micro, small and medium capitalization companies – under the spotlight of investors. This not only brings more visibility to these non-large firms, but also contributes to improving the liquidity of these companies and, more importantly, to uncovering the so-called Size Effect. Through the construction of a new MidCap share Index, this work aims to bring visibility to our companies that are not included in the PSI20 Index and check the existence of the above mentioned Size Effect in our market.