The Boyar Value Group just released our latest quarterly letter to clients.
We’ve observed before that the S&P 500 is being driven by a handful of mega-cap stocks, but things haven’t always been this lopsided. Based on data from JP Morgan, as of January 20, 2022, the top 10 companies in the market-cap-weighted S&P 500 accounted for 29.8% of the index (vs. ~17% back in 1996) and boasted an average forward multiple of 30.3x (vs. an average of 19.8x since 1996). Interestingly, says Gary Shilling, writing for Bloomberg, the decade before the average company’s market cap grows large enough to usher it into the S&P 500’s “top 10,” it outperforms the broader market by 10% a year (hardly surprising, with outperformance the driving factor in becoming a big company in the first place!)—but after companies join the top 10 club, they tend to underperform the broader market by 1.5% over the following 10 years. Anyone considering investing in some of the S&P 500’s larger stocks should keep this trend in mind, remembering what the great Wayne Gretzky used to say “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”