Is there a financial product that allows speculation on GDP?
The closest thing that you are looking for would be FOREX exchanges. Currency value is affected by the relative growth of economies among other things, and the arbritrage of currencies would enable you to speculate on the relative growth of an individual economy.
The closest I can think of from the back of my head is http://finviz.com/map.ashx, which display a nice map and allows for different intervals. It has different scopes (S&P500, ETFs, World), but does not allow for specific date ranges, though. &gt; “The economy, as measured by gross domestic product, can be expected to grow at an annual rate of about 3 percent over the long term, and inflation of 2 percent would push nominal GDP growth to 5 percent, Buffett said. Stocks will probably rise at about that rate and dividend payments will boost total returns to 6 percent to 7 percent, he said.”  [Warren Buffett](https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Simple-Dollar/2013/0506/What-Warren-Buffett-s-stock-market-math-means-for-your-retirement)  This isn't the whole picture, but it's a start. Dithering in the dark Quantifying the effect of political uncertainty on the global economy EUROPE teeters at the edge of an economic abyss, its fate in the hands of political leaders at odds over how to solve the continent’s twin debt and bank crises. America may be pushed over a “fiscal cliff” at the end of the year by political dysfunction. And even China, although unlikely to take a deep dive, is hostage to the will and ability of its government to stimulate growth. More than at any point in recent history, the global economy’s fate is tied to the capriciousness of policymakers. How much does such uncertainty cost? Anecdotal evidence suggests that it costs a lot. Customers of Cisco Systems, the world’s biggest maker of internet gear, are taking longer to make decisions, according to John Chambers, the company’s boss. Their orders tend to be smaller than before, and to require more in-house approvals. They say they are planning to buy more stuff later this year, reported Mr Chambers recently, but “then in the very next breath they say it depends on what happens on a global and macro scale.”In Europe firms must reckon not only with recession but also with the risk that their investments may be redenominated in a different currency or locked in by capital controls. Robert Bergqvist of SEB, a Swedish bank, says that several Swedish corporate customers have put investment projects on hold because they don’t know how the euro crisis will unfold. If America falls over the “fiscal cliff”, it would suffer a fiscal squeeze of 5% of GDP, easily enough to push the economy into recession. Last summer, as America’s government came perilously close to exhausting its legal authority to borrow, Barack Obama and Republicans in Congress could not resolve their fiscal differences. Instead, they kicked the can down the road, agreeing on huge automatic spending cuts that would start on January 2nd, just as all of George Bush’s tax cuts are due to expire, along with a separate temporary payroll tax cut. No deal to avoid this double whammy is likely before the November 6th election. So any firm that sells to the federal government is left in limbo. Mike Lawrie, head of Computer Sciences Corporation, a big technology-services firm, recently told investors: “I just don’t know what’s going to happen...None of us [knows].” The debt-ceiling showdown makes last summer’s weak economy weaker, said James Tisch, the boss of Loews Corporation, a conglomerate, last month. And “this fiscal cliff is the summer of ’11 but on steroids.” Economists have long suspected that uncertainty could hurt growth. John Maynard Keynes said investment was based on expectations that are “subject to sudden and violent changes”. In a 1980 paper Ben Bernanke, now chairman of the Federal Reserve, formalised this effect: since most investment is irreversible, uncertainty “increases the value of waiting for new information [and thus] retards the current rate of investment.” In the 1990s Avinash Dixit and Robert Pindyck went further, making an analogy between an investment opportunity and a stock option, the value of which rises with the volatility of the stock price but disappears once the option is exercised. If an investment is irreversible, uncertainty raises the value of hoarding cash and waiting to see what happens. Gauging the fog Quantifying uncertainty is a more recent sport. To measure it, Nick Bloom and Scott Baker of Stanford University and Steve Davis of the University of Chicago constructed an index. It counts how often uncertainty related to policy is mentioned in newspapers, the number of temporary provisions in the tax code and the degree to which forecasts of inflation and federal spending differ from each other. That index hit its highest in 25 years during last summer’s debt-ceiling battle and remains high (by contrast, the Vix index of stock market volatility, a conventional gauge of uncertainty, remains below its peak of 2009; see chart). A simpler index for Europe that tracks news reports of uncertainty has similarly spiked. Mr Bloom and his co-authors fed their index into a model of growth that seeks to filter out purely economic factors by controlling for interest rates and stock prices. They conclude that the rise in uncertainty between 2006 and 2011 reduced real GDP by 3.2% and cost 2.3m jobs. Such estimates should be taken with a grain of salt. They demonstrate that policy uncertainty and weaker economic growth are related, not that the first causes the second. Many radical policy actions, from the TARP bail-out programme to the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing and the Dodd-Frank law on financial reform, were responses to unprecedented economic trauma: collapsing house prices, failing financial institutions and the deepest recession since the second world war. That trauma did most of the damage to growth, not any uncertainty about the policy response. Had policymakers stood still, the result would have been less policy uncertainty but a far more damaging crisis. Clearly some policies, such as Mr Obama’s health-care reform, generate uncertainty independent of economic developments. But at least Obamacare comes with benefits as well as risks; that cannot be said for the current political brinkmanship. As the fiscal cliff draws nearer, argues Ethan Harris, Bank of America’s economist for North America, the incentive to defer hiring and investment will grow, putting pressure on the economy. “The process is as important as the outcome,” he says, “and the process is a disaster.”  http://www.economist.com/node/21556930  Thomas Oye Banks in certain countries are offering such facility. However I am not aware of any Bank in Hungary offering this. So apart from maintaining a higher amount in HUF, there by reducing the costs [and taking the volatility risks]; there aren't many options. Factset also provides a host of tools for analysis. Not many people know as they aren't as prevalent as Bloomberg. CapitalQ and Thomson Reuters also provide analysis tools. Most of the market data providers also provide analysis tools to analyze the data they and others provide. If anyone is interested in looking into it, the company Pinnacle has actually been using theory from quantitative finance for a long time. I went to one of their talks during useR!2017 in Brussels, really interesting betting company. "The term ""stock"" here refers to a static number as contrasted to flows, e.g. population vs. population growth. Stock, in this context, is not at all related to an equity instrument.  Yes, annual refinance costs, interest rate payments etc. are what we should be looking at when assessing debt burden. Those are flows. That was my point when cautioning against naive debt GDP comparisons.  Also, keep in mind that by borrowing in it's sovereign currency, the US has an enormous amount of monetary tools to handle the debt if it ever became a problem. Greece, by comparison, is at the mercy of the ECB, so they only have fiscal levers to pull. The interest expense does not strike me as especially concerning, but I'd be happy to verify BIS or IMF reports if you would like." Firstly, comparing debt to GDP is comparing a stock to a flow, you're committing a transgression that is warned about in Econ 101.  Secondly, I appreciate your concern about the height of debt but it's really just a measure of the flow of capital. Debt is an investment too, and the headline debt number mixes government, corporate, and consumer debt which have very different attributes. In fact the holders of most government debt are normal citizens and pensioners. More concerning might be the levels of *consumer* debt, but (I would argue) that only becomes an issue if debt starts being issued fraudulently to people who shouldn't be receiving it, e.g. ahead of the mortgage crisis.   There may be nothing I can say to convince you otherwise, and I'm not saying that overleveraging *isn't* something to be concerned about, but I'm trying to remind you that the story is more complicated than you're letting on.  Finally, respectfully, please don't scaremonger about derivatives. The notional value is very high, but derivatives are a zero-sum market (unlike the stock market, e.g.), and in fact the majority of derivatives are for hedging and reducing risk. While it's certainly possible to use derivatives to leverage oneself, this really only happens with hedge fund-type operations, and even if the derivative market blew up I highly doubt it would affect average people very much.  TL;DR, If there's another crash in the next 5 years, I doubt it will be due to debt (outside of *perhaps* China, but I think that'd lead to more of a recession than a full blown 2008-esque crisis). It definitely will not be because of derivatives. I mean, sure. But that has nothing to do with gdp-ppp, mostly because I'm pretty sure you can't pay for spying with yuan.  GDP-PPP is the metric people point when  they *really* want the US to no longer geopolitically matter.  In reality, China has got a long way to go before they get to the point of truly challenging the US. I didn't take too many finance or economics courses so i can't comment.   In my post I recommended the YouTube video or audiobook 'why an economy grows and why it doesn't'  I guess it's more economy related than finance related, but is still relevant as it touches on loans and net worth and stuff. If you are looking to analyze stocks and don't need the other features provided by Bloomberg and Reuters (e.g. derivatives and FX), you could also look at WorldCap, which is a mobile solution to analyze global stocks, at FactSet and S&P CapitalIQ.  Please note that I am affiliated with WorldCap. Assuming S&amp;P value as % of GDP doesn't change, to get S&amp;P return you add (Nominal GDP % growth + Dividend Yield) -&gt; S&amp;P return.  Historically the S&amp;P has grown faster as corporations of won market share and therefore grown to a larger portion of GDP.  While this can continue (or possibly reverse), and can happen globally as well, you are correct in pointing out that it cannot continue ad infinitum. It's important to realize that any portfolio, if sufficiently diversified should track overall GDP growth, and anything growing via a percentage per annum is going to double eventually. (A good corner-of-napkin estimate is 70/the percentage = years to double). Just looking at your numbers, if you initially put in the full $7000, an increase to $17000 after 10 years represents a return of ~9.3% per annum (to check my math $7000*1.09279^10 ≈ $17000). Since you've been putting in the $7000 over 10 years the return is going to be a bit more than that, but it's not possible to calculate based on the information given.  A return of 9.3% is not bad (some rules of thumb: inflation is about 2-4% so if you are making less than that you're losing money, and 6-10% per annum is generally what you should expect if your portfolio is tracking the market)... I wouldn't consider that rate of return to be particularly amazing, but it's not bad either, as you've done better than you would have if you had invested in an ETF tracking the market. The stock market being what it is, you can't rule out the possibility that you got lucky with your stock picks. If your portfolio was low-risk, a return of 9%ish could be considered amazing, but given that it's about 5-6 different stocks what I'd consider amazing would be a return of 15%+ (to give you something to shoot for!) Either way, for your amount of savings you're probably better off going with a mutual fund or an ETF. The return might be slightly lower, but the risk profile is also lower than you picking your stocks, since the fund/ETF will be more diversified. (and it's less work!) I spent a while looking for something similar a few weeks back and ended up getting frustrated and asking to borrow a friend's Bloombterg.   I wish you the best of luck finding something,  but I wasn't able to.   S&amp;P and Morningstar have some stuff on their site,  but I wasn't able to make use of it.  Edit: Also,  Bloomberg allows shared terminals.  Depending on how much you think as a firm,  these questions might come up,  it might be worth the 20k / year Using GDP as a proxy for economic well-being was ok, though not great, when GDP growth seemed to be linked with other measures like average salary, purchasing power, national debt and employment.  I had really hoped that the split in these different measures during and since the recession would mean that people started to look for more nuanced reporting of the stats but sadly it seems that now GDP is on the up and employment is back below 7% everything is fine in the world of newspaper publishing.