My 2 cents.....I'm barely a Monk's novice's assitant helper (in perl terms)...but I would try a hash with an anonymous array...since each item has a unique key value (DOW, SP500, Russel2000) and discrete values. The anonymous array allows you to associate multiple values with a single hash key. It's also more intiutive.<\p>

Accessing the 7th value is straight forward from there. The hash can be sorted based on the 7th value.<\p>

#Begin code example
my %hash = (
    'Dow' , [99,123,345,567,678, 756, 202],
    'SP500', [88,55,55,677,843, 987, 345],
    'Russell1000',[456,788,990,889,876,234,456],
    );

#access 7th value

print $hash{'Dow'}[7],"\n";

#should equal 202
[download]