Founded in 1831, the Spanish financial centre Bolsas y Mercados Españoles (BME) includes the stock exchanges of Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and Valencia. Banking, telecommunications, energy, tourism, construction... The Spanish stock market covers a large number of economic sectors, offering both professional and individual investors good options for diversifying their portfolios. The IBEX 35, IBEX Medium Cap and IBEX Small Cap represent the market's large, medium and small capitalisations respectively. In addition to the market capitalisation criterion, liquidity and representativeness criteria are also applied to select the securities making up these benchmark indices. Regulated by the Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores (CNMV), the Spanish equity market attracts a wide range of investors, from institutional investors to individual traders; with the opportunity to invest in historic companies as well as fast-growing innovative companies. The performance of Spanish equities can reflect reactions to macroeconomic and political events, both domestically and internationally. For example, in 2008, when the housing bubble in the United States burst with the subprime crisis, the Spanish domestic market came under pressure. And with good reason: while the triggering event was exogenous (the US crisis), the country's endogenous characteristics only served to exacerbate it (the weight of property construction and the fragility of banking institutions in particular).