The Bombay Stock Exchange is located in Dalal Street, Mumbai. Established in 1875, it is the oldest stock exchange in Asia. There are around 3,500 companies in the country which are listed and have a serious trading volume. As of January 2005, the market capitalization of the BSE is about Rs. 12 trillion. The BSE `Sensex' is a widely used market index for the BSE. As of 2005, it is among the 5 biggest stock exchanges in the world in terms of number of transactions.
BSE Sensex
Main article: BSE Sensex
The BSE Sensex is a value-weighted index composed of 30 companies with the base April 1979 = 100. The set of companies in the index is essentially fixed. These companies account for around one-fifth of the market capitalization of the BSE.
The stock market has grown by more than four times from January 1990 to today. Using information from April 1979 onwards, the long-run rate of return on the BSE Sensex can be estimated to be 0.52% per week (continuously compounded) with a standard deviation of 3.67%. This translates to 27% per annum, which translates to roughly 18% per annum after compensating for inflation.
External link