Sensex beats US, global indices

Investors may have lost about $10 billion on Dalal Street this month, but the BSE Sensex has still come on the top with better returns than its US counterpart and other global stock market benchmarks.

The Bombay Stock Exchange's 30-share barometer index has lost close to 600 points or about three per cent in November so far. The total investors' wealth, measured in terms of cumulative market cap of all listed firms has dropped from $1,603 billion to about $1,591 billion.

However, the fall of 2.97 per cent in the Sensex is less than half of over eight per cent decline in the US blue-chip index Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). It is also less than the average losses of more than seven per cent each for the European, Asia and world equity markets.

According to latest statistics released by Dow Jones Indexes and Stoxx Ltd, leading providers of equity indices for global stock markets, the DJIA posted a loss of 8.52 per cent, European stocks lost 7.38 per cent, Asia fell 7.07 per cent and World Equities fell by 7.42 per cent between October 1-26.

However, all stock market indices, including the Sensex, have been beaten out by the commodity market with its global benchmark -- Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index gaining 0.27 per cent in November.

DJ-AIGCI is a diversified index that allows investors to track commodity futures through a single measure and comprises of 19 commodity futures from seven different sectors.

However, the performance of Sensex is better than the commodity market benchmark as well as all the other global benchmark indices when compared in terms of year-to-date returns.

While the Sensex loss is not even half of the losses seen in these blue-chip indices for the month of November, the gain seen by the Indian barometer index is huge when compared with the year-to-date movement of these benchmarks.

Since the beginning of this year, the DJIA index is up 2.25 per cent, European benchmark Dow Jones Stoxx 50 is down 2.68 per cent and the Dow Jones Asian Titans 50 index is up 7.25 per cent. The Dow Jones Global Titans 50 worldwide blue-chip index is up by 0.79 per cent so far this year. The commodity index, DJ-AIGCI, is up 10.52 per cent so far in 2007, according to the data.

In comparison, Sensex posted a whopping gain of close to 38 per cent between January 1 and October 26 this year. The total investors' wealth has nearly doubled from about $800 billion at the beginning of this year.

All these indices track the biggest of blue-chip stocks in their respective market segments, such as Sensex is for India, DJIA is for the US and the DJ Global Titans 50 is for the global market.