> Regardless if it fits to FT’s thesis or not, note that the S&P recent gains can be attributed to 7 tech companies Exxon Mobil (XON) was the #3 company in 200

> Regardless if it fits to FT’s thesis or not, note that the S&P recent gains can be attributed to 7 tech companies Exxon Mobil (XON) was the #3 company in 2001, but not even in the top twenty in 2021: * https://www.bespokepremium.com/think-big-blog/largest-25-stocks-in-the-sp-500-now-vs-20-years-ago/ https://www.bespokepremium.com/think-big-blog/largest-25-sto... <5% of companies have driven most of the returns of equities: > We study long-run shareholder outcomes for over 64,000 global common stocks during the January 1990 to December 2020 period. We document that the majority, 55.2% of U.S. stocks and 57.4% of non-U.S. stocks, underperform one-month U.S. Treasury bills in terms of compound returns over the full sample. Focusing on aggregate shareholder outcomes, we find that the top-performing 2.4% of firms account for all of the $US 75.7 trillion in net global stock market wealth creation from 1990 to December 2020. Outside the US, 1.41% of firms account for the $US 30.7 trillion in net wealth creation. * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3710251 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3710251 > Four out of every seven common stocks that have appeared in the CRSP database since 1926 have lifetime buy-and-hold returns less than one-month Treasuries. When stated in terms of lifetime dollar wealth creation, the best-performing four percent of listed companies explain the net gain for the entire U.S. stock market since 1926, as other stocks collectively matched Treasury bills. These results highlight the important role of positive skewness in the distribution of individual stock returns, attributable both to skewness in monthly returns and to the effects of compounding. The results help to explain why poorly-diversified active strategies most often underperform market averages. * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2900447 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2900447 The trick is knowning which company(ies) will be that 5% and when: some do well for a time and then fade away: you would have to know when to jump in and out of them. Also, the S&P 500 being concentrated is not new and has been the case for 40+ years: * https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2020/02/5-companies-make-up-18-of-the-sp-500-should-investors-care/ https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2020/02/5-companies-make-up... It's just the companies have changed (and there's no way of easily of predicting which ones did / will rise and fall).