E*Trade Group Inc. and Standard & Poor’s are teaming up to create a series of proprietary portfolios for the soon-to-be launched E*Trade Stock Basket platform, a brokerage service offered by E*Trade Securities.

Standard & Poor’s will develop a total of 21 baskets for E*Trade, including five index-based baskets, ten sector-based baskets and six investment-style baskets, all created to satisfy strict investing criteria. The Stock Basket Platform is a new service which allows its brokerage customers to purchase
and trade entire portfolios of individual securities simply and easily in dollar-denominations.

Investors can either “build-their-own” basket of individual securities from scratch, or they can purchase a number of “off-the-shelf” baskets, including these 21 new S&P baskets.

Among the index-based baskets will be the 20 largest securities by market cap in the S&P 500, the 25 largest securities by market cap in the S&P MidCap 400 and the 30 largest securities by market cap in the S&P SmallCap 600.

The Sector-based baskets include stocks representative of the ten sectors defined by Standard & Poor’s Global Industry Classification System (GICS):  Energy, Health Care, Materials, Financials, Industrials, Information Technology, Consumer Discretionary, telecommunication Services, Consumer Staples, and Utilities.  The six style-specific baskets include Large Cap Growth, Large Cap Value, Midcap Growth, Midcap Value, Smallcap Growth and Smallcap Value.  The stocks for each basket have been chosen by top analysts at S&P.