Standard & Poor's (S&P) is a United States-based financial services company. It is a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies that publishes a wide range of financial research and analysis on stocks and bonds. It is well known for the stock market indexes, the US-based S&P 500, the Australian S&P/ASX 200, the Canadian S&P/TSX, the Italian S&P/MIB and India's S&P CNX Nifty. It is one of the Big Three credit rating agencies (Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investor Service and Fitch Ratings).
Standard & Poor's, as a credit rating agency (CRA), issues credit ratings for the debt of public and private corporations. It is one of several CRAs that have been designated a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
It issues both short-term and long-term credit ratings that can be very critical to market sentiment.
