Turnover of large cap US stocks dominated global equity trading in the past week, analysis shows
In the latest visualization, Global Trading looks at the global MSCI World index. This index accounts for $97 trillion in total market cap and is a widely followed benchmark. The different countries in the index have shown widely varying performance in the past month. Even after the rally prompted by US President Trump’s decision to pause most tariffs, US stocks show a one-month return of -11.5%, compared -7.3% with Chinese stocks. That epitomizes the investors’ view that while the intertwined economies of both countries are set to lose under mutually destructive tariffs, the US is going to fare worse.
MSCI Interactive Treemap
Disclaimer: This visualisation is a reconstruction of the MSCI World index using available public sources, without the involvement of MSCI Inc. There may be significant differences between the data shown here and the actual index.
Meanwhile, India is almost flat on the month, based on the weighted return of MSCI members, as multinationals such as Apple scramble to move supply chains there, away from China. With $3 trillion of market cap, India is currently the fourth largest country in the world by this metric. Over the same period, Brazil shows a positive return of 2%, based on its MSCI member stocks.
Looking at trading volume, the picture is muddied by currency effects, with shares typically quoted in a hundred units or so of national currency. For countries with very weak currencies, such as Indonesia, volumes appear inflated as a result. To try and correct for this, we show US dollar turnover, which is defined as average trading volume multiplied by share price in dollars.
While US stocks account for 53% of MSCI market cap, they accounted for 83% of average turnover in the past week, according to Global Trading analysis. $588 billion of US stocks changed hands each day on average over the last seven days, or 1% of US equity market cap, compared with 0.6% on average during the past year. By contrast, $72 billion of Chinese stocks changed hands each day over the past week on average, or 0.6% of market cap, compared with 0.4% normally.
Among individual stocks, there have been some dramatic increases in trading volume, particularly when compared with the last bout of trading volatility in February, that focused on chipmaker Nvidia. In the past seven days, Nvidia’s volume almost hit the same level as February, while Tesla’s volume has increased by almost by a factor of three. The surge reflects how Tesla’s fortunes are inextricably bound up with its founder Elon Musk, now a member of Trump’s administration.
Measured on a turnover basis, Tesla’s daily turnover averaged 2% of market cap in the past year. Last week, $45 billion of Tesla shares changed hands per day on average, representing 5.2% of market cap. Among large cap US stocks, only Micro Strategy showed a larger turnover ratio of 8.5%. By comparison, China’s highest turnover stock, Xaomi, had a ratio of just 2.4%, with $35 billion turnover in the past seven days.
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