Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

What's the point of a benchmark?
Markets tend to go up over time, so most things you could buy would make money. A benchmark is meant to represent the market as a whole (or a subset that is relevant to what you are trading), so you can tell if your specific choices helped or hurt your return. As an example, say you pick two financial stocks, Citi and Goldman.  They get you a return of 10% for the year, so you think you made good choices.  But if the financial sector as a whole had a return of 20%, your choices weren't actually that great.