Image Source: Pixabay

The United States continues to hold a dominant share of global stock market capitalization. In fact, it currently accounts for 47.3% of global market cap which is a multiple higher than the next largest countries: China at 9% and Japan at 5.2%. While the US still holds a lion's share of market cap, that share did take a hit over the past year as international markets generally outperformed.  As shown below, the US dropped 3.16 percentage points in the past year. The country to pick up the greatest share of those losses was China, whose share rose 1.34 percentage points.  The next largest increase was South Korea as that country's form of mega-cap stocks like SK Hynix and Samsung have soared alongside other international memory chip makers. Hong Kong also gained close to half of a percentage point of weight while other gainers saw much more modest moves.

In the chart below, we show the changes in the United States' share of global market cap annually going back to 2004. As shown, the drop in 2025 modestly surpassed the drop seen in 2022 when the major indices spent the year in the midst of bear markets.  Prior to that, the last times the US lost such a large share of global market cap were the Financial Crisis years and the mid-2000s when there was a trend of international stock market outperformance.

Showing another way with some greater detail, in the charts below we show the United States' share of global market cap and rolling year-over-year change since 2004. While the US lost weight last year, it entered 2025 and spent a sizable portion of Q1 possessing more than 50% of global market cap. The Tariff fueled sell off in the early spring sent that share sharply lower, bottoming in the mid-40% range, although those losses subsided and remained largely stable throughout most of the rest of the year. That is until December when its share of global market cap began to roll over once again. Currently, the YoY change in weight of -3.2 percentage points ranks in the 12th percentile and is the largest drop since the tail end of the 2022 bear market and 2010 before that.

As noted earlier, one notable country that has picked up the US's lost share of market cap has been South Korea.  While it is still a minor weight in the grand scheme of things, not even cracking 2%, it has hit multi-year highs. More impressively, the over 0.6 percentage point jump in the past year ranks in the 99th percentile of moves. The spring of 2021, fall of 2009, and January 2006 are the other most recent examples of South Korea gaining such a large share of international market cap.

Finally, we would note that although multiple European countries were among the top performers in 2025, the region's share of market cap didn't grow by much. As shown below, Eurozone countries' collective share of global market cap is currently hovering around 8%, which is in the middle of the past few years' range and at the low end of the range for the past 20 years.

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