India has now become the world’s fourth-largest stock market, overtaking Hong Kong. As of Monday, the total value of all the shares on Indian stock exchanges was $4.33 trillion, just a bit more than Hong Kong’s $4.29 trillion, according to data by Bloomberg.
What’s even more exciting is that India’s stock market reached over $4 trillion for the first time ever on December 5, and this huge growth happened mostly in the last four years.
Why is India’s stock market doing so well? A big reason is that more people in India are investing in stocks and the companies in India are making good profits. India is growing super fast and is seen as a great place to invest, especially compared to China. India has a stable government and a big economy that’s mostly based on what people buy and use.
At the same time, Hong Kong’s stock market isn’t doing so well. This is because of a bunch of problems in China, like strict COVID-19 rules, tough regulations on companies, a struggling property market, and issues with Western countries. All these problems have made investors less interested in China and Hong Kong, causing their stock markets to lose a lot of value.
Even though India’s stock market is booming right now, some experts think this might change in the future. For example, UBS Group AG, a big banking group, thinks that Chinese stocks might do better than Indian ones in 2024. They say that Chinese stocks are really cheap right now, so they have a chance to increase in value. Another group, Bernstein, also thinks the Chinese market will get better and suggests that investors should be careful with Indian stocks, which might be too expensive.
But for now, investors seem to like India more than China and Hong Kong. In 2023, foreign investors put more than $21 billion into Indian stocks. This helped the main Indian stock index, the S&P BSE Sensex, to go up for the eighth year in a row.
