Point taken but I think it's a bit of a fallacy to frame this way. The market can go up and down as can individual stocks; "85% of the decline" doesn't make sense because some stocks are going up.
A book I read a few years ago put this more eloquently. Some governor said that 20,000 jobs were created last month and his state contributed half of them. Well, many states lost jobs and the state next door actually gained MORE jobs, so the "more than half" framing makes no sense
I wouldn't say it's a fallacy. It's just an interesting way to look at the data.
I think more people need to be talking about the fact that the S&P 500 has extreme concentration risks that didn't exist 15+ years ago (and the Chart of the Day demonstrates that). We're in uncharted territories re: market cap concentration.
I think the point was that those stocks are causing the S&P to be overweight towards those firms that are highly invested in AI. It's like comparing personal wealth when Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are included in the list - the average ends up far above the median.
A similar explanatory mirage happens in elections: when a candidate loses by (say) 1% of the vote, people go looking for factors that produced a 1% swing and declare, “it’s because of inflation! it’s because they took position X! it’s because the other team focused harder on turnout!”. You can find several such explanations and no single one is the causal one.
I don’t think it’s misleading (at all) when you take into account that the index is volume weighted. If you held two different stocks: 1 from megacorp worth 90; 1 from smallcorp worth 10; if megacorp is down 10% while smallcorp is up 10%. Your portfolio would still be worth less even though 50% of your portfolio positions are up.
It's been interesting to review my portfolio, such as it is, against this situation, and see that I'm down relatively little. Not because I've bet against anything per se, but I made a conscious decision years ago to diversify out of the SP500 ("VTSAX and chill!") into broader and exUS indices.
We might have to come up with a new name for the top stocks if SpaceX and Anthropic IPO this year. I noted that Musk might be getting ahead of any IPO fatigue that might be caused by the big 2 AI companies. Will OpenAI somehow stealth their way into a listing before those two?
Also some of the recent declines will be due to the war.
It's totally crazy that Tesla gets included with real companies. It's a meme stock with a 323.88 price to earnings ratio. It has no business being in the S&P 500 and should quite frankly be delisted.
Misleading because it shows % of total decline as opposed to each ones decline. The bigger the company the more points they have to lose..., so Oracle for example losing 20 points may be a smaller % decline on their part than a samller company that looses less.
All these, include the war and oil spike, and all the current liquidity dramas, will be historic rounding errors.
Boomers already started to burn their $78 trillions in savings. And taxes will skyrocket for the rest to pay their fat unfunded pensions. Oh, and don't forget giving them subsidized/free healthcare. And a last FU, they collude to rise rent (they are the landlord class).
Stocks that were driving the market in gains for two years are now going down? Who would have thought that these stocks might have been overbought by people...
S&P in general has been giving returns in the past ten years ~12%. Seems like more of the same to me.
I like how they keep making BS names to create their financial engineering BS marketing and narrative going. so it's The Hateful Eight now what for this year and next? It used to be, FAANG, MAG7,ZIRP this, ZIRP that, Gamestop reaching to their FT stories and every news reporting at same week and so many made up BS from finance engineers.
Media is ready to lie to you and feed you BS, just waiting order(s) from finance dep.
85 comments
A book I read a few years ago put this more eloquently. Some governor said that 20,000 jobs were created last month and his state contributed half of them. Well, many states lost jobs and the state next door actually gained MORE jobs, so the "more than half" framing makes no sense
I think more people need to be talking about the fact that the S&P 500 has extreme concentration risks that didn't exist 15+ years ago (and the Chart of the Day demonstrates that). We're in uncharted territories re: market cap concentration.
> The market can go up and down as can individual stocks
Literally the main reason we even have indexes.
> "85% of the decline" doesn't make sense
85% of the decline represented by the overall index.
> so the "more than half" framing makes no sense
It makes perfect sense. It's just misleading.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-ira...
Also some of the recent declines will be due to the war.
Boomers already started to burn their $78 trillions in savings. And taxes will skyrocket for the rest to pay their fat unfunded pensions. Oh, and don't forget giving them subsidized/free healthcare. And a last FU, they collude to rise rent (they are the landlord class).
But hey, they never forget to vote.
S&P in general has been giving returns in the past ten years ~12%. Seems like more of the same to me.
Media is ready to lie to you and feed you BS, just waiting order(s) from finance dep.