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> The DAX is made of the 40 most valuable German companies.

Not to be too nitpicky here but these are only the publicly traded companies. You have a number of pretty large German companies that are still entirely private such as Aldi, Schwarz Group, Boehringer or Bosch.

Also many medium sized companies which are productive and competitive but not public, so never grow to huge sizes. I view this as a feature not a bug… smaller companies have a more direct connection with their workforce and tend to behave better with them.

> DAX is made of the 40 most valuable *listed* German companies

https://www.famcap.com/top-500-german-family-businesses-the-...

Not all of those are listed, or listed in Frankfurt

No it isn't? It's the list of the biggest blue-chip Germany-HQ'd companies trading on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. If you're a German company with exclusively German employees trading in London, or Paris, or New York, you don't qualify.

The CDAX index has about 360 companies and appears to have a market cap of around 2 trillion EUR vs 1.7 trillion for the DAX 40.