Stats › Global markets and exchanges › Global exchanges
The world's largest stock markets
If you own a global equity fund, it's worth knowing what global actually means in practice. The world's stock markets are not spread evenly across the world. One country holds more listed value than the next nine put together, and that has not always been true.
So this page is the ranking. Every major market by the total value of the companies listed in it, most recent figures I could get. Alongside it, the one historical episode I think everybody should know about: Japan was briefly the largest equity market on the planet, and then its main index took 34 years and 2 months to get back to where it had been. I built the page for two reasons. The first is that people buy something labelled international or global and are genuinely surprised when it turns out to be mostly American. The second is the Japanese story, which is the standing counterexample to the comfortable idea that shares always come back if you wait. They may. But in at least one large market, waiting meant longer than most people's entire investing life.
A warning about the data, because this is one of the messier statistics on the site. Different publishers count differently and some published rankings contain obvious errors. I've used one consistent country level source rather than stitching several together, and I've explained in the notes why. Have a look yourself before you quote any of it.
US listed companies were worth $75.04 trillion in April 2026, more than the next nine largest markets combined. China follows at $14.84 trillion, then Japan at $8.19 trillion and Hong Kong at $7.41 trillion. The concentration of global equity value in one country is the single most striking fact in this dataset, and it is a relatively recent development: Japan was briefly the largest equity market in the world in 1989, and the Nikkei then took 34 years and 2 months to reclaim its peak.
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