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Index levels are not comparable with each other, so everything here is rebased to 100 at a date you choose, turning which number is bigger into what each would have done to the same money over the same years. The Nikkei is tens of thousands, the FTSE five figures, copper under five dollars.
40 series · earliest 1885-02-28 · month-end observations · refreshed daily
How to read this, and how not to
A series that did not exist at the rebase date is left out rather than started late at 100. Two lines beginning at 100 on different dates are measuring different periods, which is the precise misreading a rebased chart invites. Indices are price returns in local currency, so they exclude dividends and take no account of exchange rates: a Japanese index rebased in dollars would tell a different story again. Inflation is the one distortion you can switch off here. Real deflates every series by the CPI of the country it is priced in before rebasing, which is the difference between Brazil looking like the best market on earth since 1994 and Brazil looking ordinary. Commodities are continuous front-month futures, so the long series carries the discontinuities of contracts rolling over, not just the price of the metal. Currencies are units per US dollar, so a rising line means a weaker currency. None of this is investment advice; all of it is geography with a time axis.