by Connor Darrell, Head of Investments
A relatively quiet week in terms of market returns was highlighted by a major milestone in market history. On Thursday, Apple became the first company ever to achieve a market valuation of $1 trillion. The story of Apple’s rise from a startup company headquartered in its founder’s garage to $1 trillion tech behemoth is one of the greatest narratives in the history of capitalism, and that story understandably dominated headlines. But more pertinent to everyday investors, the U.S. economy added 157,000 new jobs in July and the unemployment rate ticked back down below 4%. Wage growth, which has been closely watched by the Federal Reserve, remained subdued.
International equities (as measured by the MSCI EAFE index) traded down 1.45% for the week, while U.S. equity markets (as measured by the S&P 500) produced a 0.8% gain. Interest rates moved higher to start the week, with the 10-year treasury briefly pushing back above 3% on Wednesday before dropping lower and finishing the week largely unchanged.
Mega Cap Stocks Dominate the Index
Apple’s trillion-dollar milestone highlights another phenomenon that we have discussed in the past; that the world’s largest companies have an outsized impact on index returns. In the first 6 months of 2018, the top 5 largest companies in the S&P 500 contributed over 80% of the index’s 2.7% gain. Indexing is a popular and low cost means of capturing market returns, but as the biggest companies continue to get bigger, index investors would be well served by reviewing the concentrations that exist within their index of choice. The strongest argument in favor of indexing stems from how notoriously difficult it is for stock pickers to consistently beat the market. There exists a natural and inexpensive means of achieving diversification within an index fund, and by purchasing a fund that tracks the index, an investor is not exposed to the risks of choosing the wrong stocks. However, as the biggest companies continue to capture a larger share of market cap weighted indexes, that diversification benefit begins to fade.