Indian stocks world's top performer

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 dollars 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 USD 1,650 billion to USD 1,565 billion during the same period.
   
However, a PTI 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 USD 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.

Indian stocks gave a negative return of over 2 per cent in the US dollar terms, and the losses have been much larger of over 15 per cent in China. Brazil has given a negative return of about 5 per cent, while Russia has been the best performer among BRIC countries with a loss of just about 0.6 per cent.
   
In terms of year-to-date return, investors have gained close to 60 per cent from Indian stocks, while the gain is about 67 per cent in the past one year, 53 per cent in 3 years, 48 per cent in 5 years and just about 19 per cent in 10 years.
   
While the Indian stock market has been on an overall uptrend over the past decade, the returns calculated in the US dollar has dipped due to the sharp depreciation in the US currency against the Indian rupee over the past one year.

Still, Indian stocks have given a better performance than all the developed markets for year-to-date, 1 year, 3 year, 5 year and 10 year returns.

For developed markets, Finland is on the top for year-to-date performance (48 per cent), one year returns (54 per cent) as well as 10 year returns (16 per cent). Norway has given the best returns for 5 years (36 per cent) and 3 years (30 per cent).
     
Among emerging markets, Peru has given the best year-to-date return of 80 per cent, followed by Brazil (70 per cent), China (66 per cent) and Turkey (62 per cent), while India ranks at the fifth position.

For the 10-year returns, India is the third best performer among emerging markets after Czech Republic (26 per cent) and Korea (22 per cent).