*5.2. Benchmarks*

The Standard and Poor's 500 index is used to define the relative performance of the proposed approach. Stock indexes are often used by practitioners as benchmarks because they summarize valuable information regarding the main sectors of an economy. The S&P500 is perhaps the most well-known and used index; it aggregates information about

the five hundred biggest publicly traded companies in the United States of America. Since we are making decisions considering information only from this index, comparing the performance of the proposed approach with it is fair. In addition to the S&P500 index, in order to validate our approach, we have included several benchmarks to measure the effectiveness of our proposal. These benchmarks are: the approach of ([10]), the approach of ([12]) and our approach without including downtrends.
