The Credit Suisse Commodity Benchmark has been designated as the benchmark for a new US mutual fund launched by investment manager Pimco.

The Pimco CommoditiesPlus Strategy Fund is a commodities index fund which combines positions tracking the Credit Suisse Commodity Benchmark Index with a portfolio of short-term bonds.

According to the fund's public disclosures, it was launched on 26 May 2010 and currently has assets under management of over USD700m. 

The benchmark updates a physical commodity futures index originally formulated in 1975 and first published in 1978. The bank has retained the key aspects of that index – including rebalancing, multi-period exposure and weighting methodology – to create a benchmark for the performance of the global commodities markets.

The benchmark is currently made up of 30 commodities. It uses a four-step weighting method based on production value and market liquidity that attempts to create balanced risk and reduced correlation between commodity components.