by John Rubino
Dollar Collapse
Wolf Richter just published some charts that, for anyone with a sense of stock market history, are pretty ominous. It seems that the major market indexes that recently soared back to record highs are being elevated by an amazingly small number of stocks – Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook to be specific — which he calls the “Giant 5.” These stocks now account for nearly one-fifth of the Wilshire 5000 stock index’s value:
That kind of dependence on just a handful of companies is intuitively scary. What’s even scarier is that we’ve been here before, and each time the result was ugly.
In the 1960s and early 1970s the US stock market was dominated by a group of large-cap stocks that took on a life of their own, elevating the market far beyond what it would have been without them. See if this Investopedia entry sounds familiar: