The World’s Largest and Smallest Stock Markets

In the world of business, seeing a corporation’s name in a stock exchange is one way of saying it exists. Basically, a stock exchange is a mutual organization that provides a trading facility where stock brokers and traders trade stocks and other securities. And a stock exchange is the most important component of a stock market.

Market capitalization is basically the foundation of any stock exchange. Total market capitalization is the sum of the stock exchange’s domestic and foreign capitalization. Domestic and foreign market capitalizations are the total number of issued shares of either domestic or foreign companies multiplied by their respective prices at the last trading day of the year. But in determining the size, a stock exchange’s domestic capitalization is used as the basis.

Currently, there are 52 main stock exchanges in the world. Of the twenty major stock exchanges in 2007 – seven are in Europe, six are from the Asia Pacific, four in the Americas division, two from South Asia, and one from Africa. In 2008, the New York Stock Exchange, whose code is NYSE and also known as “the Big Board”, was ranked as the largest stock market in the world. It has a domestic capitalization of USD 10.3 billions in October 2008. And if New York Stock Exchange is the largest, the smallest stock exchange in the world is found in Asia – the Mongolian Stock Exchange. It only has a market capitalization of USD 612 millions.