One of the advantages of living in a global economy is access to a wide variety of financial markets. With this chart, you can compare performance across a number of global economies using Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) data over a number of time periods.

While we encourage people to think expansively about their long-term investments, we also want to caution that country-specific ETFs should not be romanticized just because they are "foreign". While individual countries can certainly buck international market trends (for better or worse), more often than not the international markets follow each other in much the same way that the economy of New Jersey follows New York, although perhaps not to the same extent.

Methodology

This chart pulls same-day quotes for major ETFs indexed to specific foreign markets. For larger financial markets like China, Japan and Germany, our index returns the average of the 2-3 largest dedicated ETFs. To calculate total return over time, any dividends are added to the gain/loss at the end of the period.