The high degree of coupling between global financial markets has made the financial village prone to systemic collapses. Here we present a new methodology to assess and quantify inter-market relations. The approach is based on meta-correlations (correlations between the intra-market correlations), and a Dependency Network analysis approach. We investigated the relations between six important world markets -U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan, China and India from January 2000 until December 2010. Our findings show that while the developed Western markets (U.S., U.K., Germany), are highly correlated, the inter-dependencies between these markets and the Eastern markets (India and China) are very volatile and with noticeable maxima at times of global world events. Finally, using the Dependency network approach, we quantify the flow of information between the different markets, and how markets affect each other. We observe that German and U.K. stocks show a large amount of coupling, while other markets are more segmented. These and additional reported findings illustrate that this methodological framework provides a way to quantify interdependencies in the global market and their

The stock market index is one of the main tools used by investors and financial managers to describe the market and compare the returns on specific investments. Common approaches to index calculation rely on a company's market value generating a weighted average as the index. This work presents new methods of computing adaptive stock market indices based on dynamical properties of the underlying index constituents, and introduces measures to evaluate their performance. The premise behind this work is that the influence of each stock on other stocks should be a major factor in determining the weight given to each stock in the index composition. The methodologies presented here provide the means to construct a dynamic adaptive index, which can be used as a benchmark for the underlying dynamics of the market. We investigate the components of the S&P500 index, and the components of the TA25 index, representing a large (NYSE) and a small (TASE) developed market, respectively. We focus our study on periods before and during the 2008 Sub-prime mortgage crisis. Our results provide evidence that the adaptive-indices provide an effective tool for policy and decision makers to monitor the stability and dynamics of the markets, and identify bubble formation and their ensuing collapse.