
Nowadays the buzz word in equity investing seems to be diversification and globalization. Every news channel that you see will be awash with pundits describing the benefits of diversification, and exposure to international equity as one such avenue. But this is something I wanted to check out and figure for myself. The best way would be to simply compare the performance of the Indian stock markets vs a major international stock index, and the obvious one that comes to mind is the US stock market. So I set out to compare the performance of the NIFTY 50 as a proxy for the Indian stock markets, vs the DOW JONES Index, which is a proxy for the US stock markets. This analysis is useful in 2 scenarios. There are several NRI investors who struggle to decide whether to keep their investments in the US, or deploy them back home in India. There are also India based investors wanting to get a piece of the US market action in the name of diversification. Both these investors are looking for the same thing, which is the best returns on their investment Dollars or Rupees. In this article I have attempted a simple comparison of the US and Indian stock markets, by contrasting the NIFTY vs the DOW. The results certainly surprised me! Why don't you take a look for yourself here.