Nothing is going up like the number of indices. Last week alone brought the launch of an exchange-traded fund linked to the perhaps unfortunately named Ipox – an index of the performance of initial public offerings.

The Ipox stood as a good example of the spreading indexing industry. While once “the market” in the US meant the Dow Jones Industrial Average and almost nothing else, there is now a proliferation of indices from big merchant banks and stock exchanges, as well as the specialist index providers such as Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s. It is not a difficult market to enter, as the success of Ipox Schuster, progenitor of the new ETF, makes clear.