Your rupee is shrinking.
Your portfolio shouldn’t depend on it.

The Ibovespa is dominated by a handful of companies: the iron-ore miner Vale, the oil major Petrobras, and the large banks Itaú and Bradesco. Two of those move with global commodity prices and the other two with Brazilian interest rates and credit. When oil and iron ore rise, the index’s biggest earners benefit directly, and when they fall the same weights pull the index down. In 2026, firmer oil and iron-ore prices have again been the main support for the heavyweights.

The dataset shows how much of the result is the cycle. The same index returned only about 2% a year in dollars over 15 years, a window that starts soon after the 2000s commodity boom peaked, but about 12.5% over five years and about 34% over the last one. Currency matters as well: the real absorbed part of the local gain, so the 20-year dollar return (4.0%) is less than half the local one (8.7%).

The India angle is specific. India imports most of its oil, so an oil-price spike tends to be a headwind for the Indian economy and the rupee, while Brazil’s index tends to sit on the other side of that trade. That is reasoning about structure, not something measured on this page.

Two of the strongest recent results share a source: the build-out of AI computing. South Korea’s market is unusually concentrated in memory-chip makers. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together make up around 40% of the KOSPI, and demand for the high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers has lifted both. The index rose about 76% in 2025, its best year since 1999, and the table shows a one-year rupee return of about 129% (the KOSPI Composite, used here as a proxy).

In the United States the Nasdaq 100 has led over the 7-, 10-, 15- and 20-year windows. That lead began long before AI, in the era of software and internet platforms, but AI infrastructure spending has extended it: the index returned about 31% a year in rupee terms over three years.

Neither engine is well represented at home. Nifty 50 is weighted toward financials, consumer, energy and IT services, with little in semiconductors or AI hardware, and it fell over the last one and two years while these markets rose. The concentration that delivered the return is also the risk: in 2026 the KOSPI has swung by double digits within days whenever AI sentiment turned.

Here the engine is a falling currency. When a currency loses value year after year, prices of goods, property and shares in that currency rise with it, and listed companies’ nominal revenues and profits climb with inflation. The BIST 100 compounded at about 19% a year in lira over 20 years and about 33% over ten, headline numbers that rival the Nasdaq. In dollars it returned roughly zero, because on this page’s own figures the lira lost about 16% of its dollar value every year. Turkish inflation peaked near 75% in 2024 and was still about 31.5% in August 2026, with the lira at record lows near ₺49 to the dollar.

Pakistan shows the same mechanism over the long run. The KSE 100 earned about 15% a year in rupees but about 7% in dollars over 20 years, with the rupee giving up roughly 7% a year. The latest rally has a different cause. The index rose about 44% in fiscal 2026 and roughly 335% over three fiscal years, but that came after the rupee steadied, inflation cooled and interest rates were cut under an IMF programme; the dollar return was slightly higher than the rupee one. Currency weakness lifted nominal prices for decades, while stabilisation drove the most recent leg.

For an outside investor, nominal gains in a high-inflation currency are mostly the currency doing the work. The INR column is what a rupee investor would actually have earned: about 4% a year from the BIST 100 over 20 years and about 11% from the KSE 100, far below the local-currency headlines.