India: World's best performing stock market

India: World's best performing stock market
21 Nov, 2007, 1903 hrs IST, PTI

NEW DELHI: India has emerged as the world's best performing stock market in the past three months, notwithstanding the five-day plunge that wiped off close to $85 billion of investors' wealth from the bourses.

The country's benchmark Sensex has lost over 1,300 points in five trading sessions pulling down the total market capitalisation of all the listed firms from about $1,650 billion to $1,565 billion during the same period.

However, an analysis of three-month US dollar return data available with the global market intelligence service provider MSCI Barra for equity markets across the world shows that Indian bourses have delivered the highest gain of 33.64 per cent during this period, thus adding over $400 billion to the investors' kitty.

The developed markets like the US, Japan, Austria, Sweden and Belgium have given negative returns in this period, while UK managed a modest return of 0.6 per cent.

The best performing developed markets has been Spain (18 per cent) and Hong Kong (17 per cent). But, their returns is just about half of the same on Indian bourses since August 21.

Worldwide, India is followed by Qatar, UAE and Egypt with a gain of about 28 per cent each. Among emerging markets, India is followed by Brazil with 31 per cent return, while Chinese stocks have managed to give about 17 per cent returns.

But, there are others as well like Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Chile, Mexico and Venezuela who have registered a fall during this period.

Since the beginning of this month, however, just a handful of markets have managed to register a positive return.

Spain is the only developed market to have seen a modest gain in November (0.6 per cent), while Morocco, Egypt, Colombia and Jordan are the only emerging markets posting positive returns.