A number of the financial services houses that have been troubled by high levels of leverage and market volatility have found themselves falling off the key Standard & Poor’s/ASX indices.

Standard & Poor’s has rebalanced its S&P/ASX Indices with the result that Mirvac Group and Babcock & Brown Limited have been removed from the S&P/ASX 50, while Challenger Financial Services Group has been removed from the S&P/ASX 100 index and Allco Finance Group Limited, Centro Properties Group and Octaviar Limited have all been removed from the S&P/ASX 200 index.

Perhaps ominously for the financial services industry, not one pure financial services company has been added to the index in the latest re-balancing.