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(Bloomberg) — Check a ranking of the best-performing equity indexes this year and the US doesn’t crack the Top 10. You won’t find it in the Top 25, either. Double that, and the S&P 500 is still absent.

The tally needs to unfurl all the way to 66 before the world’s most valuable equity index shows up — leaving it way behind Greece’s Athex and even Israel’s TA-35. It’s one of the worst relative performances since the global financial crisis for the US benchmark.

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The underperformance is even more surprising given the S&P 500’s  rally to countless records in 2025. But it’s still trailing most developed market benchmarks like Germany’s DAX and Japan’s Nikkei 225, and lags behind gauges in South Korea, Spain and Ghana, when measured in dollars.

That last qualifier is critical, though not determinant. The US currency has fallen  this year, helping to boost returns on foreign bourses in dollar terms. That’s certainly the thrust behind gains of at least 39% in Colombia and Morocco.

But even in local-currency rankings, the S&P 500 comes in just 57th, hardly befitting of a measure home to the six most valuable companies in the world, along with the likes of Coca-Cola Co., McDonald’s Corp. and Walt Disney Co.

The underperformance, market participants say, owes just as much to a broader shift in the mindset among foreign investors, who have started targeting domestic champions as President Donald Trump wages a global trade war. Tensions ramped up on Friday after the president renewed threats of tariffs on China. Even in the US, they’re being more selective, with a focus on big tech rather than broad-based indexes.

Added to that is a growing sense of concern about political and fiscal stability in the world’s largest economy. Trump’s tax and spending bill is projected to blow out the deficit. The government has been shut down since the start of October, the president is increasingly threatening the central bank’s independence and public investment decisions have become less policy-based.

Together, the moves have shaken confidence in America, weakened the dollar and helped stoke a torrid rally in gold. While long-term Treasury yields haven’t exploded in any similar fashion, they’ve been elevated relative to recent years.

“The deteriorating US fiscal situation and increasing policy uncertainty are eroding investor confidence in the US market, weakening the dollar, and prompting investors to explore opportunities in non-US markets,” said Jasmine Duan, senior investment strategist at RBC Wealth Management Asia.

Of course, strategists have for years been predicting an imminent rotation away from US equities and those calls have fallen flat. The dollar’s slide has eased in recent weeks as political stresses mount around the world, from France to Japan to Argentina.

And while the S&P 500 is lagging well behind the top three — Ghana, Zambia and Greece with gains of at least 61% — its  rally this year has created about $6 trillion in market value, equivalent to more than a third of the entire capitalization of the Stoxx 600.

The US is also coming off of back-to-back years with gains north of 20%, easily outstripping the likes of the Euro Stoxx 50 and Nikkei 225. If you take stock of performances since the end of 2022 to 2024, the S&P 500 ranked 10th.

Lasting Outperformance

Still, there are evident reasons that global equity markets may continue to outperform. European interest rates are half the level in the US, giving corporates access to cheaper financing. Companies trade at valuations about 35% lower than in America.

And so in Germany, Rheinmetall AG has more than tripled to lead the DAX to a  gain as the government promises to step up defense spending. European banks, long laggards, have been revitalized. In Spain, Banco Santander SA has almost doubled in value.

South Korea’s Kospi index has risen  this year as investors speculate the new president’s push for shareholder-friendly policies will boost returns. The nation’s standing as a sophisticated chipmaker has given it domestic champions in artificial intelligence, with Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc. rising after deals to supply chips to OpenAI.

“Asia has been a great platform to bring diversification in our portfolio, and to express our preference for looking for alpha within asset classes,” said Sophie Huynh, portfolio manager and strategist at BNP Paribas Asset Management.

Similarly in Japan, expectations for a pro-stimulus lawmaker to become the next prime minister have pushed stocks to all-time highs. SoftBank Group Corp.’s  surge has powered the Nikkei 225. Defense equipment makers Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and Japan Steel Works Ltd. also rallied this month on optimism around more government spending.

Global money managers are returning to China after years of aversion, drawn by advances in high-tech industries. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s plans to ramp up AI spending, and Huawei Technologies Co.’s aim to challenge Nvidia Corp. helped Chinese stocks log their best run of monthly gains since 2018. The Hang Seng Tech Index’s year-to-date advance of  is more than double that of the Nasdaq 100.

Too Expensive

The S&P 500’s stellar run from its April low has stretched valuations to levels that have raised alarm and prompted investors to diversify exposure. The index trades at 22 times forward earnings, a premium of 46% to the rest of the world. It’s also famously top-heavy, with mega-cap tech and its smaller brethren accounting for more than one-third of the index by weighting. A 53% rally in the two years starting at the end of 2022 had left foreign investors over-exposed to American equities.

“Investors should be rebalancing, taking profits from their US allocation and increasing exposure to Europe, Asia and emerging markets,” said Kristina Hooper, chief market strategist at Man Group, the world’s largest publicly traded hedge fund. “The US will continue to lag other markets.”

For now, buying from foreign investors remains on pace for a record, as fears of a recession recede. Their purchases make sense given the US is home to the key players in the AI frenzy, led by Nvidia.

But many are moving money, according to a Bank of America Corp. survey of fund managers. Global investors were a net 14% underweight US stocks in September, while being 15% overweight euro-zone peers and 27% overweight emerging markets. There’s also evidence foreigners are being more selective, and why not? Just six stocks account for over 50% of the S&P 500’s gain this year. In fact, a gauge that strips out market-cap biases is up just  this year.

“The last two years have only been about the US and nothing else because tech earnings were surging while everything else was down to flat,” said Beata Manthey, head of European and global equity strategy at Citigroup Inc. “This year, the growth differential between the AI trade and the rest of the world has narrowed, and it’s going to narrow even more next year. So there are more themes to choose from.”

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Cables have been stripped from an area near a major rail junction causing disruption for weekend passengers, a train operator said.

Greater Anglia said the theft between Shenfield and Brentwood, in Essex, resulted in a “loss of signalling” and the lines being blocked to London Liverpool Street on Saturday morning.

Network Rail and British Transport Police teams were sent to replace the cables in order to reopen the railway, with trains then resuming about lunch time.

A Greater Anglia spokesman said it was “sorry for the disruption” and affected passengers would be able to claim compensation for any delays.

The spokesperson added Saturday travel tickets could now be used on Sunday instead.

It was expected to take up to three hours before the train timetable was back to normal.

Greater Anglia said trains would be delayed, altered and cancelled in order to get crews and vehicles back into the correct places.

Signalling problems were first reported early on Saturday, before Greater Anglia later said the cable has been stolen.

Shenfield is a major junction for many services, including trains using the Great Eastern Main Line.

The blocked lines had prevented trains from running between Shenfield, Romford and London.

Passengers had also been unable to travel as normal on intercity trains between Norwich, Ipswich and London Liverpool Street.

Routes between Clacton-on-Sea, Colchester, Braintree Town and Southend Victoria to Liverpool Street were blocked too.

Passengers from Norwich were told to travel to London via Cambridge instead on GTR trains between Ely and London King’s Cross.

The incident also affected trains on the Elizabeth line between Stratford and Shenfield.

Greater Anglia, which runs trains across the East of England and into London, is to be brought into public ownership on Sunday.

By Gordon Gottsegen

If legacy financial institutions don’t embrace new technology, their competitors may leave them in the dust

New York Stock Exchange parent company Intercontinental Exchange announced a $2 billion investment into prediction-markets platform Polymarket.

This past week, Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, announced a $2 billion investment into prediction-markets platform Polymarket. On the same day, S&P Dow Jones Indices (SPGI), the company behind stock-market indexes like the S&P 500 SPX, announced a partnership with fintech company Dinari to create a crypto-focused index.

Although these are two different legacy financial institutions partnering with two different fintech companies, both announcements referenced one thing: tokenization.

Tokenization refers to the creation of a digital identifier for a real-world asset, which allows that asset to trade on a blockchain, like bitcoin (BTCUSD) does. For now, tokenization of the entire stock market is a far-off dream. But that doesn’t mean financial institutions aren’t thinking about it: Companies like Robinhood Markets Inc. (HOOD) and Coinbase Global Inc. (COIN) have both experimented with tokenizing stocks.

But when you think about the New York Stock Exchange, which was started in 1792, and Standard & Poor’s, which traces its history back to 1860, you may not think of two companies that like to move fast and break things.

So why are these two financial-industry behemoths moving in the same direction all of a sudden? The answer is two-fold. Firstly, they see it as an opportunity to bring in new sources of revenue. And secondly, if they don’t innovate, their competitors may leave them in the dust.

Racing to where the puck is going

In its partnership announcement, S&P Dow Jones Indices said that it plans to create the S&P Digital Markets 50. Similar to the S&P 500, the S&P Digital Markets 50 will be a market-tracking index that follows 15 of the largest cryptocurrencies and 35 U.S.-listed companies in the crypto space.

S&P said this new index reflects a growing demand for crypto.

“Cryptocurrencies and the broader digital-asset industry have moved from the margins into a more established role in global markets. Our expanded index suite offers market participants consistent, rules-based tools to evaluate and gain exposure to this segment,” Cameron Drinkwater, chief product and operations officer at S&P Dow Jones Indices, said in the announcement.

That demand is also there for prediction markets. While the crypto industry may have had a head start on prediction markets, companies like Polymarket and Kalshi are growing rapidly – and now processing hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars in volume each month.

Also read: Here’s why Wall Street is betting against DraftKings and FanDuel – and going all in on Polymarket and Kalshi

“Polymarket knows where the puck is going,” Joe Saluzzi, head of equity trading at Themis Trading, told MarketWatch. “And where I think they’re going is something called tokenization.”

Saluzzi said that tokenization of all sorts of assets, including stocks, is something that many people in the financial system are talking about. While many are excited about it, he said, there’s also an undercurrent of competition.

In the movie “The Big Short,” there’s a scene where some of the main characters go to the S&P ratings agency and ask about how bonds get their AAA rating. When the woman at the agency reveals that all mortgage-backed bonds get AAA ratings, she blurts out that if she doesn’t give the banks the ratings they want, they’ll take their business elsewhere.

Although the movie is a Hollywood dramatization of what actually happened during the 2008 financial crisis, Saluzzi made an analogy to this scene and said it may be how financial institutions are now thinking. If they don’t move quickly to embrace crypto, tokenization and prediction markets, then their competitors will.

Financial incentives

Financial institutions don’t adopt new technology merely for the sake of innovation. They do it when there’s a business incentive.

For example, retail brokerage Robinhood makes money when its customers place trades. That tends to happen more when markets are up, noted Paul Rowady, director of research at Alphacution Research Conservatory, who tracks investor and market flows.

“When the market goes down, like it did in 2022, the client equity of Robinhood goes down in correlation with that. And I think that that’s true of all these guys,” Rowady told MarketWatch.

So what does Robinhood do to keep its customers active when market conditions aren’t favorable? They expand into new product verticals, like prediction markets.

“If the market goes down, the exchanges and Robinhood want their user base to be able to gamble on sports,” Rowady said. Getting into prediction markets is a way for these financial companies to hedge by diversifying their businesses.

Robinhood makes money on transaction-based revenue. For stock exchanges like Intercontinental Exchange, they make money providing financial data to institutional clients; that includes selling things like prop data, colocation fees and access to high-speed data ports.

As markets grow and see more volume, they also create more data. Prediction markets are still dwarfed by the stock market, but they’re growing rapidly. Thomas Peterffy, the founder and chair of Interactive Brokers Group Inc. (IBKR), said that he believes prediction markets will be larger than the stock market within the next 15 years. If that happens, stock exchanges may want to hedge their bets by looking into new markets.

Read: After a big 2024 election, why prediction markets could soon eclipse the stock market

But when S&P creates an index, the business incentive may be a little more simple.

“Create an index. Get paid,” Saluzzi said. “Somebody licenses it out, you can create an ETF based on your index, and the index companies just collect the toll.”

Saluzzi noted that it always comes back to financial institutions making sure they get paid. These are businesses, and they have to make money in order to continue operating. That doesn’t mean there’s some sort of malicious intent; crypto and prediction markets have grown organically based on retail-investor demand.

“In the end, it’s giving the people what they want. The retail [investors are] demanding this,” Saluzzi said.

When centuries-old financial institutions start moving quickly, it’s a sign that the demand is there.

-Gordon Gottsegen

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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  10-11-25 0700ET
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