Vodafone Airtouch lit the fuse for debate when they successfully acquired Germany’s equivalent, Mannesmann. The combined assets of the enlarged business mean that it now accounts for over 10% of the Index. Since, authorised UK funds are not permitted to hold more than 10% of a funds assets in one company, the "anti-tracker" investment managers tried to argue that trackerfunds had had their day.

But within hours almost, the tracker funds had found a solution. Deutsche Bank announced a new synthetic debenture to track Vodafone Airtouch which means UK funds can continue to track the Index accurately with the proper weighting in Vodafone Airtouch.

No sooner had the ink dried on the new debentures, Index tracking was back in the limelight with the announcement by BGI of a new idea for tracking indicies called i-shares which will trade on a new section of the LSE to be called ExtraMARK.

i-shares will be like unit trusts but investors will be able to trade them on the Stock Exchange. The idea, which has come from the US and Canada (the US refer to them as ‘spiders’), has been hugely successful. The reason for this success is that it costs less to buy and sell them which means the tracking error could be more accurate.

And if the announcement about i-shares wasn’t enough news on index-tracking, the arrival of numerous hi-tech entrants into the hallowed ranks of Britain’s top 100 companies made certain we got our proper fill of index tracking news. In with the new and out with the old - we wave goodbye to household names like Whitbread, Scottish & News, Thames Water, Hanson, Alliance & Leicester and Allied Domecq and herald the arrival of Baltimore Tech, Capita, Freeserve, Psion and Thus - some are complete strangers to most investors.