European Stocks, 10 Years Later

If you were going to buy Western European stocks 10 years ago today--amid the wild celebration over the fall of the Berlin Wall on that day--you would have been wisest to buy into the Swedish market, which has soared 380% since then. By contrast, pity the buy-and-hold investor who settled on the Austrian market as a hot prospect. Stock returns across Europe in the last 10 years are, well, all over the map. For many of the established markets, the euphoria sparked by the Wall’s fall quickly sent share prices to extraordinary levels that weren’t seen again, or significantly surpassed, until the mid-1990s. A sampling of Western European market indexes:

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Closing price Monday Percentage Market (index) Nov. 9, 1989 close change Sweden (OMX) 199.30 955.68 +380% Netherlands (AEX) 129.61 582.13 +349 Switzerland (SMI) 1,689.40 7,348.90 +335 Germany (DAX) 1,462.96 5,647.94 +286 Spain (IBEX-35) 3,034.10 10,336.80 +241 Britain (FTSE-100) 2,201.70 6,374.30 +190 France (CAC-40) 1,801.09 4,994.77 +177 Ireland (Overall) 1,660.15 4,568.39 +175 Italy (BCI) 648.56 1,442.43 +122 Norway (OBX) 379.30 606.77 +60 Austria (ATX) 946.99 1,166.43 +23 U.S. (S&P; 500) 336.57 1,377.01 +309

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Source: Bloomberg News