The top 10 US stocks are now 38% of the S&P 500

Ten companies — Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet (A+C), Tesla, Berkshire, Eli Lilly — now make up 38% of the index. In 1999 it was 27%. At the dot-com peak in 2000 it was 25%.

For operators that sounds like a trivia fact. It isn't. It means two things: first, if you run a business whose customers read "the market is up" and feel richer, the wealth effect is increasingly concentrated on people who hold those ten names. Second, if you're building in an adjacent category to any of those ten, you are building inside their shadow and every pricing decision will be compared to theirs.

The line we'd sit with: the index is not the economy.