Visualize the Markets: Global Exchanges

I'm a visual thinker. I think that's pretty common. So, it's not so strange that I make visual representations of investing.

This is the first in a series of three posts around visualizing the markets (there may be more, but I've only coded three so far). You should probably subscribe so you don't miss them. 😉

Below are the major global exchanges visualized in a bubble chart using a technique called circle-packing. You can click on the image below, and it'll whisk you away to an interactive version. Clicking on a region will zoom in on the underlying exchanges (it's neat, you should go try it). Clicking again will zoom you back out. This is likely not going to work well on mobile, sorry.

The red dot is the Canadian market.

Things you should take away from this:

• The global market is > USD$100TN.
• Canada is but a small piece of the global market.
• Asia and Europe are probably bigger portions than you expected.
• $NVDA, $AAPL, and $MSFT's market caps are roughly the same as the entire
• Canadian market.
• You should [probably] invest globally as a Canadian, and that means not just the U.S.

About the Data

The data is mainly from The World Federation of Global Stock Exchanges.

I've cleaned it up and added London to it (the LSE is not a member!).

The data is reasonably current - it was snapshotted at the end of January 2024. It's quite hard to get snapshot data of all markets simultaneously. Mexico is included in Latin America because that's generally how things get sliced up - I realize it's part of the North American continent!

I pondered making this live, but market and reference data isn't free – despite the fact you can get it for free on Google Finance.

For the Technical Folks

This was created in JavaScript using the amazing D3.js (Data Driven Design).

It's hosted in the app server environment over at Digital Ocean. I push updates directly from VS Code on my laptop via Github and they auto-deploy at Digital Ocean in Toronto.

I used ChatGPT to clean up the JSON data and add regions to it. It's pretty good at stuff like that.

You can hit me up with questions about this on 𝕏 (@looniesandsense).

Whilst every effort is made to make sure this information is complete and accurate, it is not advice and you should talk to a professional about your circumstances.