The surprisingly lucrative business of making a list of 500 stockstoggle caption Richard Drew/AP/APThis comes from the Planet Money newsletter. Less well-known is that S&P Global, the company that makes the S&P 500 and that employed Blitzer, is itself on the S&P 500 list. In 1982, the investment-management company Vanguard started offering S&P 500 index funds — basically, an easy way to invest in all the stocks of the S&P 500. That fee was based on how much money people invested in S&P 500 index funds and ETFs (or spent on S&P 500 futures). Blitzer's simple list of 500 stocks was one of the hottest portfolios on Wall Street, and getting access to it was cheap.