That's the biggest one year jump in market value post-global financial crisis
And no surprises on who were the biggest contributors to that. Tech stocks.
A WSJ report shows that the S&P global broad market index (which included most stocks from 48 countries) had garnered over $9.6 trillion in market value through last Thursday - beating the previous spike of $8.1 trillion created in 2009.
The S&P 500 index contributed to about $3.9 trillion - with almost 1/4 of that value being generated from Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft. Over in China, technology giants that form the acronym BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent Holdings) added $511 billion in market value over the course of the year.
The report adds that most analysts interviewed sees another solid year for equity markets in 2018 - with the key underlying risk being an overheating global economy which would force central bankers to remove stimulus more quickly than expected.
But with regards to the US, the analysts interviewed mentioned that their main worry is inflation uptick - which would provide the key piece to the puzzle for the Fed to raise rates more than the expected 3 times this year.
