A benchmark for the world's publicly-traded entertainment companies — deliberately weighted to elevate pure-play and smaller firms and de-emphasize the megacaps that dominate conventional market-cap indices.
Total-return basis (dividends reinvested), all constituents converted to USD. The AXIOM GEI is the headline series; equal-weight and cap-weight variants of the same basket are shown for context.
The same 90-company global basket under four weighting schemes, versus the broad U.S. market. The contrast between them is the story of the decade in entertainment.
| Series | Level | Total return | CAGR | Volatility | Max drawdown | Sharpe |
|---|
Volatility and Sharpe annualised from daily returns (2% risk-free). Correlation of AXIOM GEI to the S&P 500: — a distinct benchmark, not a market proxy.
If you weight an entertainment index by market value, it stops being an entertainment index. One company swamps everything.
On today's values, the five largest names — Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Netflix — would be ~89% of a conventional cap-weighted version of this basket (the largest, Apple, 28.4% on its own). The "index" would simply track Big Tech, not entertainment.
AXIOM instead scores every company on an importance tier (1–4) for how central entertainment is to the business, weights by that tier, and holds every name in a tier equally. Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta are all present — but each at just 0.33%. Disney and the far smaller CD Projekt carry the same 1.34%. Size no longer decides influence — relevance does.
The 90 names grouped into the major entertainment segments. Weight is the share of the index each segment carries; return is that segment's index-weighted average since entry.
Bars scaled to the largest segment. “Avg return” is the index-weighted average total return of the names in each segment since entry — not the return of a tradeable segment sub-index.
Survivors of the original 2017 AXIOM universe mapped through a decade of mergers, refreshed with newer entrants and broadened across Europe, Japan, Korea, China and India. Returns are since each name's entry — search, sort and filter the full basket below.
Entertainment churned violently between 2016 and 2026. Names left through takeovers, merged into new giants, or listed for the first time. Acquired names live on in the index through their corporate successors.
Transparent by design. Full construction rules, data sources and caveats are in the methodology note.
Publicly-traded entertainment companies across 15 countries and major exchanges (New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, Hong Kong and more), each converted to USD. 90 constituents spanning film & cinema, TV & cable, streaming, music, games, live events and radio, as of 29 June 2026.
Each company is hand-scored 1–4 for how central entertainment is to its business. Tier 1 (pure-play) counts 4×; tier 4 (peripheral, e.g. Apple) counts 1×.
Names in the same tier carry identical weight, so a small pure-play counts as much as a giant. This is what elevates smaller firms and caps megacap dominance.
Quarterly, on a total-return basis (dividends reinvested), base 1,000 at January 2016. Local prices are converted to USD; new entrants join at the first rebalance after listing.
Every major industry has a recognised benchmark for one simple question — how is the sector doing? Media & entertainment never had one of its own. This is the thinking behind building it.
Tobias is a CFO in media and entertainment. Over the past decade he has financed and built companies across film and television in London and Los Angeles — as an M&A advisor, a fractional CFO and a deal architect for founders, studios and investors.
I built this index because one question never went away — how is the entertainment industry actually doing? Weight a benchmark by market value and a handful of tech giants end up answering for everyone. I wanted a lens that keeps the storytellers — the studios, labels, game makers and venues — at the centre. This is that lens, ten years deep. Welcome.
Tobias hosts The Media CFO — the show about the money, deals and dealmakers behind the global entertainment industry.
The world’s only show about the money, deals and dealmakers behind the global entertainment industry — deep conversations with the executives, founders and investors shaping film, television, music and games. Watch the full video episodes on YouTube, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.