Giant Company Musical Chairs

The major market indexes are dominated by the largest companies. Usually 50 companies or fewer determine what happens with the indexes. In this post, Bespoke Investment Group shows how the largest companies have changed over the last 10 years. Some have been quite volatile. ExxonMobil, for example, over the years has rotated between being the largest company in the world to being an also-ran among the giant. Others have rapidly increased in size. A few years ago they weren’t among the largest companies but now steer the indexes. These include Apple and Google.

The point of this exercise is not so much to beat up on XOM and GE, but to try and help you recognize how much things can change in a ten-year span. A good number of the companies on this list had market caps of less than $50 billion back in August 2007, and now they’re mega-cap behemoths. Heck, Facebook (FB) wasn’t even public ten years ago, and now it’s the fourth largest company in the US.