Stock market value traded - Country rankings

Definition: The value of shares traded is the total number of shares traded, both domestic and foreign, multiplied by their respective matching prices. Figures are single counted (only one side of the transaction is considered). Companies admitted to listing and admitted to trading are included in the data. Data are end of year values.

Discussion: Value traded as percent of GDP is calculated as the total amount of shares traded over the course of one year (number of shares traded times their prices at the time of the trade) divided by GDP. This is a measure of how active the stock market of a country is. There may be large market capitalization with either many firms traded or few but very large firms, but there may be limited activity in terms of buying and selling shares. The value traded measure captures the trading volumes to reveal how active the market is.

A related measure is the stock market turnover ratio which also looks at the volume to stock market trades but related to the market capitalization, not GDP. Therefore, it is good practice to look at both measures when evaluating how active a stock market is. The correlation of the two measures is about 0.4 when looking at data for the last ten years, i.e. it is positive but not close to 1.