France's benchmark and the world's closest thing to a listed index of luxury. Nowhere else does a national blue-chip index rest so heavily on global consumer desire.
1987Base date
40Constituents
Price returnHeadline version
Float-adj. capWeighting
The CAC 40 takes its name from Cotation Assistée en Continu — continuous assisted quotation — the Paris Bourse's early electronic trading system. Its base date is 31 December 1987, at a level of 1,000, and it is operated today by Euronext.
The selection rule is narrower than it first appears: the forty most significant stocks drawn from the hundred largest market capitalizations on Euronext Paris, weighted by free-float market capitalization. Significance accounts for trading volume as well as size, so the largest hundred by value is the eligible pool rather than the answer.
An index of desire
Every national index has a sector character. The CAC 40's is unusually distinctive: luxury goods, cosmetics, spirits, aerospace, energy and pharmaceuticals. The companies that dominate it sell handbags, champagne, skincare and aircraft to a global customer base.
What the CAC 40 actually sellsCharacter of the index
Total index market capitalization was reported at approximately €2.67 trillion in February 2026. Sector weights shift; verify current figures against Euronext.
The consequence is that the CAC 40 behaves less like a French economic indicator and more like a global read on discretionary consumer spending — particularly in China and the United States, where luxury demand concentrates. A slowdown in Chinese consumption shows up in Paris faster than it shows up in most other national benchmarks.
It is one of the more elegant examples of the general point: an index measures the companies that happen to list in a country, and those companies may have very little to do with that country's economy.
Price return, unlike its neighbor
The CAC 40 is explicitly a price-return index — dividends are excluded from the quoted level. Its immediate neighbor, the DAX, is quoted as total return.
These two indexes are compared against each other constantly in European market commentary, and the comparison is structurally unsound unless one of them is converted. A CAC 40 total-return series exists for exactly this purpose and is the version to use when comparing across borders.
The CAC 40 sits within Euronext, a pan-European exchange group spanning Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dublin, Lisbon and Oslo. Its national indexes — CAC 40, AEX, BEL 20 and others — share infrastructure while retaining separate identities, which is why Euronext ranks among the world's largest exchanges by combined listed value despite no single country dominating it.
Facts worth knowing
Named after a trading systemCotation Assistée en Continu — the Paris Bourse's automation program, now long superseded.
Drawn from the top hundredThe eligible pool is the hundred largest on Euronext Paris; the forty are chosen on significance including trading activity.
Its name is a fossilThe automation program it was named for is long superseded, and the index's early published refresh interval — measured in seconds rather than milliseconds — is a reminder that "continuous" once meant something slower than it does now.
Family control is commonSeveral of the largest constituents have concentrated family ownership, which the free-float adjustment reduces but does not eliminate as a governance consideration.
Luxury concentration cuts both waysThe sector's global reach delivered years of outperformance and then transmitted a Chinese consumer slowdown directly into the French headline index.
Common questions
Is the CAC 40 a good proxy for the French economy?
Only loosely. Its largest constituents earn globally, and luxury and aerospace demand is set outside France far more than within it.
Why is French luxury so dominant in the index?
Because the world's largest luxury groups are French and list in Paris. That is a fact about corporate history rather than an index design choice, but it shapes the benchmark completely.
Does the CAC 40 include dividends?
Not in the headline level, which is price return. A separate total-return version exists and is the one to use for cross-border comparison.