U.S. Large Caps Continue To Trail Their Small Cap Peers

With the recent winning streak of the S&P 500 we've seen more attention paid to large cap names. Some have said that the focus of investors has shifted from small caps to safer large caps. The three major S&P indices are shown below for the last year:

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We took a look at a sample of the fifty largest and fifty smallest stocks in the S&P 500 to see where these gains are occurring. We would assume that if there is a true shift from small to large, then the largest stocks in the S&P 500 would outperform, right? Below we have sampled the 50 largest and smallest names using Price, Cap and Dollar weights, in each case the larger stocks have underperformed by half.

Comments

[Bruce Merri...:]

This is an excellent insight, and probably only the tip of the iceberg. Wenow have some 29 million incorporated U.S. businesses (up from 4.6 million in 1982). About 27 million of these (1) have less tha 100 employees (2) account for a rising 65% of the GDP, but (3) have only about 5% that are publicly traded...so are largely invisible. This is where most of the jobs are created (since 1982 90 million jobs have been created, but we lost 45 million in downsizing and restructuring our 1.5 million large businesses...netting out at +45 million. (The American Miracle).

Small businesses with less than 100 empoyees not only create new jobs, but are the innovators that create new wealth. (About 95% of all household American wealth has been generated since 1982...now about $65 trillion, up from $3 trillion in 1982). It's no wonder that your data reflect this disparity, which is much more pervasive than is generally realizes....or can be measured by our current Government data, which largely come from about 150,000 big businesses.

I wish you would expand on your observations.

Bruce Merrifield

2007 May 24 09:56 AM