The Xero Limited (ASX: XRO) share price has been one of the best performers on the S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO) on Wednesday.
At one stage today the cloud-based business and accounting platform provider's shares were up over 13% to a record high of $130.50.
The Xero share price has since pulled back a touch but is still up a decent 6.5% at the time of writing.
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Why is the Xero share price zooming higher today?
Investors have been buying Xero shares on Wednesday for a couple of reasons.
The first is the impending release of its half year update tomorrow morning.
It appears as though some investors are expecting the company to deliver a strong result despite the negative impact that COVID-19 is having on small businesses.
What else is driving the Xero share price higher?
Also giving Xero's shares a boost today is its inclusion in the illustrious MSCI Global Standard index this morning following its quarterly review.
Xero was the only ANZ based company out of 141 new additions to the index this morning. Thankfully for local investors, no Australian companies were among the 135 companies that were deleted from the index.
Given that the MSCI Global Standard index is one that fund managers and index funds track, the buy side has been a lot firmer than usual today and helped drive its shares higher.
What is the MSCI Global Standard index?
The MSCI Global Standard index is MSCI's flagship global equity index. It is designed to represent the performance of the full opportunity set of large and mid-cap stocks across 23 developed and 26 emerging markets.
According to MSCI, as of December 2019, the index covered more than 3,000 constituents across 11 sectors and approximately 85% of the free float-adjusted market capitalisation in each market.
It has been built using MSCI's Global Investable Market Index (GIMI) methodology, which is designed to take into account variations reflecting conditions across regions, market cap sizes, sectors, style segments, and combinations.
