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European index returns
Put the DAX, the FTSE 100 and the CAC 40 on one chart and you'd think you were comparing three national stock markets. You're not, not quite. The DAX counts dividends as if you reinvested every one of them. The other headline indices don't count them at all. Same picture, two different rules, and the difference compounds every single year.
This page has the calendar year returns for the DAX, FTSE 100, CAC 40, Euro Stoxx 50 and OMXS30, plus the part that makes those columns readable: which of them include dividends, what the same index looks like on a price basis versus a total return basis, and what withholding tax quietly takes out of the middle version. Germany gives us the cleanest test of all, because Deutsche Boerse publishes both versions of the DAX from the same starting point on the same day.
I put it together because European index comparisons get made carelessly all the time, including by people who should know better, and the error runs in one direction: it flatters Germany and it makes the UK look like a decade of dead money. Four sources sit at the bottom, mostly factsheets from the index providers themselves, each with its own as of date. Where a figure is my arithmetic on published levels rather than something a provider published, the notes say so plainly.
The single most important fact about European index comparisons is that the DAX is a total return index and the other four are price indices. The DAX includes reinvested dividends; the FTSE 100, CAC 40, Euro Stoxx 50 and OMXS30 headline versions do not. Since both were set to 1,000 at the end of 1987, the DAX has compounded at 8.78% a year and its price only sibling the DAXK at 6.01%, a gap of 2.77 percentage points a year. Euronext's own factsheet shows the CAC 40 at 5.52% a year on price against 8.81% on gross return since 1987. 2025 was the strongest broad European year of the decade, led by the DAX at 23.01%.
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Below this point there are 9 sections, 1 chart, 1 table and 4 named sources, roughly 1550 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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