Stock Market In 2024: Indices Remain Behind Global Counterparts, Yet Deliver Strong Returns For Investors

Despite the challenges seen by the markets in the final quarter of 2024, investors saw strong yields from the year as midcap and smallcap stocks outperformed resulting in great returns for traders.

As per Motilal Oswal Wealth Management, the key equity benchmark index, Nifty50, hit an all-time high of 26,277.35 in September 2024.

Source : Wikipedia

The domestic stock markets in 2024 witnessed a major roller coaster ride. The equities segment clocked record highs and also witnessed heavy correction as the year came to a close. However, investors were still able to get positive returns from their trades, backed by a jump in domestic fund flows and a macro landscape that remained resilient, analysts noted.

As per Motilal Oswal Wealth Management, the key equity benchmark index, Nifty50, hit an all-time high of 26,277.35 in September 2024. The markets corrected from their all-time high in the last two months of the year, reported PTI. 

Despite the challenges seen by the markets in the final quarter of 2024, investors saw strong yields from the year as midcap and smallcap stocks outperformed resulting in great returns for traders. However, Nifty and Sensex remained behind their counterparts specifically, the US markets. This underperformance was due to the consistent and aggressive selling seen from the FIIs, said Santosh Meena, Head of Research, Swastika Investmart Ltd.

This correction was also the third major decline seen by the markets since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, with consistent selling seen by Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) due to a mix of domestic and global factors, the brokerage noted.

Prashanth Tapse, Senior VP Research, Research Analyst, Mehta Equities Ltd, said that the equity markets faced the brunt of the Israel-Iran conflict and the current Russia-Ukraine war in the year. “2024, was a year of tug of war between the bulls & bears marked by volatility majorly driven by global microeconomic data points followed by geopolitical tensions impacting markets. Despite all the uncertainties around the world, Indian markets sustained the pressure and delivered very decent returns. It was also a year of surge in valuation to the peak making Indian markets the most expensive in the world. While the excess liquidity in the market pushed valuations as high as possible surpassing fundamentals theories which eventually invited corrections in the markets from the top,” the analyst said.