by Michael Pento
Pento Portfolio Strategies LLC
There are a handful of stocks in which institutions and individual investors have recently piled into. This behavior is emblematic of all bull markets once they begin to hit the manic phase. Wall Street falls in love with a few high-growth darlings and takes their valuations up to the thermosphere.
If you add up the market capitalizations of just four stocks, Google (Alphabet), Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, their combined worth exceeds $5 trillion. If you throw in Facebook, you get the top 5 biggest firms by market capitalization, and they compose an amazing 18% of the S&P 500. Another way of looking at this is that the market cap of a full 282 companies in the S&P 500 now equals the same as the top 5 behemoths.