The journey towards the $1-trillion mark is nothing less than spectacular, considering that the market cap was just about $150 billion in 2004. To put in context, the total bank deposits in 2004 was $500 billion and has crawled to about $650-700 billion in the same period.

The new listings and the rise in prices of large-cap companies over the last three to four months aided the upward journey of the bourses.

Market cap of major countries
As on May 15, 2007	$ billion	per cent
World	56187.31	100.00
AMERICAS
United States	18817.67	33.49
Canada	1652.29	2.94
Brazil	1295.18	2.31
Mexico	390.76	0.70
Chile	199.85	0.36
EUROPE/AFRICA
Britain	3997.76	7.12
France	2851.26	5.07
Germany	2011.79	3.58
Switzerland	1300.61	2.31
Italy	1183.15	2.11
ASIA/PACIFIC
Japan	4875.72	8.68
China	2181.10	3.88
Hong Kong	1895.45	3.37
Australia	1118.24	1.99
India*	975.52	1.74
South Korea	919.35	1.64
*as on May 16, 2007 Source: Bloomberg

 A total of 33 new scrips, including Idea Cellular (Rs 30,372 crore), Power Finance Corp (Rs 15,602 crore), Indian Bank (Rs 5,406.51 crore), Firstsource Solutions (Rs 3,913.32 crore), MindTree Consulting (Rs 2,973.38 crore), Fortis Healthcare (Rs 2217.97 crore), Global Broadcast News (Rs 1,855.46 crore), Redington India (Rs 1,378.69 crore) and ICRA (Rs 926.05 crore) added as much as Rs 70,710 crore to the market cap. One of the prominent gainers in the m-cap journey is Reliance Capital, whose m-cap crossed the $ 5 billion-mark on Wednesday.

Also the Delhi-based Unitech has become the country's first real estate company to cross the $10 billion mark in market capitalisation. Its market capitalisation increased by Rs 3,981.68 crore (Rs 39.81 billion) on Wednesday to close at Rs 43,446.24 crore ($ 10.64 billion).

The Sensex, which closed at 14,127.31 on Wednesday, is just 525 points away from the peak of 14,652 posted on February 8 this year. The previous highest m-cap was Rs 39,25,746 crore on February 7, when the Sensex touched 14,643.

"We are sure to reach $1 trillion mark sooner than later. If you look at the current rally, only about 10-15 stocks have participated. A combination of new listings and the rise in share prices of the 10-15 large caps have helped us to hit the new milestone," said Ajay Bagga, chief executive officer of Lotus India Mutual Fund.

The stream of mega share offerings in the pipeline, including Rs 13,000 crore (Rs 130 billion) by the Delhi-based property developer DLF, another Rs 10,000-plus crore follow-on issue by ICICI Bank, Rs 7,000-plus crore (Rs 70 billion) issue by State Bank of India, apart from share offerings from the SBI subsidiaries and other banks could take the m-cap closer to $1 trillion.

"By including the capitalisation of Indian entities listed on London's Alternative Investment Market, the global firms acquired by the listed Indian companies in the last two months and others that are often considered a part of the Indian universe, we reach a total of $992 billion," said Nilesh Jasani, research analyst of Credit Suisse, in the recently published report on the $1 trillion Indian economy.

Indian companies led by the Tatas, Hindalco and now the UB Group have made overseas acquisitions worth $26 billion in the last 10-12 months.

Eight of the 10 economies saw their stock markets rise in the one-year period after they first crossed the $1 trillion GDP mark. The UK is the only economy that fell below the trillion-dollar mark for a while after attaining the status for the first time, according to the Credit Suisse report.