A couple of years ago — okay, it was more like six — I told Lisa that “the Dow won’t break 10,000 for years.” A few months later it shattered 10,000 on its way to a peak of 11,908.50 in January 2000. My vindication was bittersweet when it sank back into the low 7,000s back in October 2002. Now that the Dow has recovered back into the 10s, I’m quite relieved. (I still maintain that we have a long time to wait for the Dow to reach 36,000.)
But look at the new guy on the block: The Bombay Stock Exchange, whose “sensitive index” (or Sensex) just surpassed 7,500 a week ago and closed over 7,750 today.
In terms of total market capitalization, the BSE has a very, very long way to go before there’s more money tied up in it than in the securities traded on the NYSE or the Nasdaq. But in terms of growth the value of stocks tracked by the Sensex is phenomenal. Of course, so is the volatility, and prior years weren’t always so good.
