Abstract
One of the extraordinary features of today’s equity market is the extreme concentration of S&P 500 in a handful of names. Most readers know that stocks like Nvidia and Microsoft, the “AI plays”, essentially drive the performance of the S&P 500 and Nasdaq. We were interested in seeing the degree of market concentration at the last bubble peak in 2000. Historically, narrow market leadership portends future weakness in prices. So we did some quantitative work and put together some interesting charts updating our “S&P 495” chart series. We added one name, Nvidia, to create the Super 6 (Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Amazon, and Meta), and compared these six to the remaining 494 stocks, the S&P 494.