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
Citations:
Apollo Academy: S&P 500 Concentration Approaching 50% - https://www.apolloacademy.com/sp-500-concentration-approachi... - March 14th, 2026
> The 10 biggest companies in the S&P 500 make up almost 40% of the index, and if Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX are added later this year, the concentration could approach 50%, see chart below. The bottom line is that the S&P 500 basically doesn’t offer much diversification anymore.
Apollo Academy: Extreme AI Concentration in the S&P 500 - https://www.apolloacademy.com/extreme-ai-concentration-in-th... - January 13th, 2026
> The bottom line is that investors in the S&P 500 remain overexposed to AI.
TLDR Concentration risk https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/concentration-risk
(not investing advice!)
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 extreme concentration risk lessens as these 8 stocks fall in value compared to the rest.
I also don’t personally see the risk in the concentration. Risk of what? These companies are legitimately larger and doing more business than other firms.
Pick a median consumer. Which company are they sending more profit to than companies like Apple or Amazon?
10 years ago the average consumer maybe bought an iPhone from Apple every 3 years, so they gave Apple less than $100 of pure profit dollars per year.
Now that same consumer is giving Apple money for the iPhone, but also spending on services that they weren’t buying 10 years ago. If they’ve got an Apple One subscription they’re now sending Apple double or triple the profit they used to get.
These companies are big because they sell more things and are more diversified than they were in the past.
There’s no concentration risk. I’d actually argue that the concentration risk can be resolved overnight through antitrust regulation (e.g., force Apple and Amazon to split into multiple companies, as they already have obvious verticals that could stand alone).
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...
This is specifically one of those points in stock history where it isn't true; the heavyweights of the S&P 500 are dragging it down while the smaller companies are less affected.
Getting mostly out of hateful 8 hype isn't bad though when they're going down...
https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profi...
Also some of the recent declines will be due to the war.
I am not the first person to say this, but I guess I took a lot of what he said at face value because I don't really know anything about physics or rockets beyond a high school level. Then he started saying stuff about computers that were "slightly off" at best, and since I know a lot more about computers it made me realize he was kind of full of shit.
https://www.ft.com/content/59adbe42-ca30-47f3-9cda-5415945e9...
15 days of price discovery for SpaceX instead of 1 year for inclusion into indexes. Will be one of the largest wealth transfers from common people to the wealthy since it'll exploit all passive investments to provide exit liquidity for elon and his investors.
Famously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry
> During his payments toward the credit default swaps, Burry suffered an investor revolt, where some investors in his fund worried his predictions were inaccurate and demanded to withdraw their capital. Eventually, Burry's analysis proved correct: He made a personal profit of $100 million and a profit for his remaining investors of more than $700 million.
You basically need to predict his death at this point. Which is unlikely due to being rich and not extremely old. But not off the table if you look behind the scenes at his habits.
If you want to gamble, buy put options and size according to how much money you're okay with losing (the premium is all you pay)
Large investors do not need to purchase index funds, instead they can direct index and purchase the underlying stocks directly. If you're a small investor, the index funds offer diversification but without the ability to divest from individual stocks covered by the index; large investors that are direct indexing can just decide to exclude meme stocks and not buy them, and in so doing make a long-term bet that those stocks will underperform the rest of the index (and without needing to pick a specific date by which that underperformance will happen, unlike a short).
There's an argument to be made that there should be a maximum share price (stocks that reach the maximum trigger an automatic stock split), and that stocks should be allowed to trade for fractions of a penny (after all, what really prevents this in a day and age where all trades are electronically settled? Nobody needs to cash out for literal copper pennies...). Much smaller individual share prices would make it more feasible for smaller investors to build direct indexing strategies.
S&P500 inclusion is a simple math calculation based on market cap. By definition, Tesla must be included until its value drops far enough to exclude it. That will probably never happen short of an apocalyptic event.
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.