Seven Companies - $12 Trillion
How the “Magnificent Seven” are driving tech investing
Ric Edelman: It's Tuesday, January 23rd. On today's show, The Magnificent Seven. Yeah, the Magnificent Seven is a concentration that America should probably be worrying about. Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta (used to be Facebook), Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. The Magnificent Seven collectively, those seven stocks, rose 72% last year. Their combined market cap is $12 trillion. That's more than the entire stock markets of Canada, England and Japan combined. It also means that the IT sector is now 30% of the entire S&P 500. 500 stocks, and seven of them basically represent a third of it. Makes you wonder what the other 493 stocks have to do with it.
The power of tech is undeniable. That's why I've been talking to you about exponential technologies for years. That's why this show is called The Truth About Your Future. It's all about tech. Last year, the Russell 1000 Index rose 23%. But if you exclude the tech sector, the index only rose half as much.
At the same time, 61% of US adults own stocks, but the wealthiest 10% own 93% of those stocks. And the top 1% of Americans owns more than half, 54% of all the stocks. So add it all up. Look at all these statistics combined. The messages are clear. If you want to create wealth, you need to invest in stocks. And if you really want to create wealth, you need to emphasize technology and especially exponential technology.
Most people are going to ignore both of those points, or they don't have the opportunities to participate. They don't earn enough money to do so, or they don't work for a company that offers a 401(k) or other retirement plan, or they don't know how important it is to do all this, or they lack the knowledge to do it, or they're just too lazy to do it. For all these reasons, laziness is the least likely reason that people don't invest in stocks. The real problem is that they don't have the opportunity.
And the more people there are who don't own stocks, and the bigger the population of people who are excluded from the stock market, the more resentment there will be over this income and wealth disparity. If we don't address it, we face the very real risk of civil unrest, even to the point of revolution.
It's happened in other countries. We've already seen small examples of this here in the US. Remember the 99% movement back in the 2000s or the more recent downtown takeovers in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities, or the current political unrest by people in both parties. Think about all this. And how it might affect your future.
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