Morningstar Indexes Selected by IMX Health for First Healthcare Futures Exchange Product Offering

Morningstar, Inc. (Nasdaq: MORN), a leading provider of independent investment insights, today announced that the Intelligent Medicine Exchange (“IMX”), the first futures and options exchange focused on the healthcare economy, has aligned with Morningstar Indexes to offer its first futures product. The IMX exchange was designated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in January of this year.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240305493160/en/

Healthcare represents nearly 20% of U.S. GDP but until IMX there was no dedicated derivatives market specifically focused on managing healthcare risk.

The new futures product from IMX Health will be based on the Morningstar US Healthcare Index, which measures the performance of approximately 170 U.S. public healthcare companies representing biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, research services, home healthcare, hospitals, long-term care facilities and medical equipment and supplies. This market capitalization-weighted index is designed for optimal tradability and liquidity. Among the largest current holdings in the index are household names like UnitedHealth, Eli Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson.

Amelia Furr, global head of sales for Morningstar Indexes, said: “We are excited to offer a Morningstar index as the basis for futures on IMX exchange. This new relationship represents another step in the growth of our index-based derivatives products business in recent years and is a great example of our expansion to a much broader ecosystem of global investor audiences.”

Jim Plante, chief executive officer and co-founder of IMX, said: “The Morningstar U.S. Healthcare Index is the ideal underlying cash equities index on which to base our first futures contract. Morningstar Indexes understands the importance of market representation as well as liquidity and tradability when operating in index-based futures and recognizes the important balance between these two requirements when designing an index suited for our market. We are delighted to have them as our first collaborator, as we continue to develop our own proprietary indexes that will complement theirs.”