The recent financial crisis has caused a considerable slowdown in most developed countries and has also affected financial markets and growth prospects in developing countries. As the stock market is considered the barometer of any real activity, the first signs of the financial crisis were visible through the changes registered by the above performance indicators that characterized the stock markets.The main aim of this paper is to analyze the performance of the stock market indicators during the recent financial crisis in several countries. In fact the paper is emphasizing the different ways in which the recent crisis has influenced countries with a mature capital market, as the Western European countries, Japan and the USA, and how their turn has affected the emerging ones, as the Central and Eastern European countries.The study refers to a sample of ten selected countries and through an empirical analysis of selected indicators, such as market capitalization, turnover, share price indices and other main indicators that reflect the performance of the whole capital market provides a chronological explanation of the evolution of the events on each market during the crisis period.