GameStop promoted to S&P 500

Although gamers have had a lot to be happy about with the deluge of games this year, arguably the biggest winner has been industry megaretailer GameStop. On the heels of opening its 5,000th brick-and-mortar shop in October, GameStop announced company-best quarterly sales of $1.6 billion, with net income rocketing up 283 percent to $52 million.

Following GameStop's strong quarterly performance, the Standard & Poors 500 financial index has announced that the retailer will soon join its lofty ranks. GameStop will be taking the place of media publisher Dow Jones, which News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch announced he would be purchasing for $5 billion in August. Replacing GameStop on the S&P 400 will be airplane-cabin interior-parts manufacturer and aerospace-fasteners distributor BE Aerospace Inc.

The S&P 500 is one of the most popular indexes of large-cap publicly held companies that appear on the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ stock exchange, and is often used to predict US economic activity. To be classified as large-cap, a company must have a market-capitalization value of more than $5 billion. Conversely, the S&P 400 comprises mid-cap publicly held companies, which have a market-capitalization value between $1.5 billion and $5.5 billion.