It was likely other user(s) who downvoted a comment that they perceived as low-effort and adding little to the discussion, which I could easily see if the entire comment was something like “Such as?”
I would be curious as to what your prompt ends up being (and the reply obviously) if you choose to do so.
That is to say, I was hoping to get an elaboration of the implicit critique in the comment I originally replied to, since that person seemed so upset that they must have had a profound disagreement with the premise in the article, rather than just being upset that the author didn't seem to have used AI. I suspect they don't want to reply because they know any examples of "strong economies" where the gains were monopolized by a few key players can be easily countered with the story of how those economies subsequently entered a terminal decline, and/or relied on state subsidies to survive. It would also be self-defeating for me to consult AI since I disdain that person's apparent sentiment that we should always default to LLMs instead of having human discussions, considering evidence on our own and reaching our own conclusions.
Does the S&P 493 reveal a different economy or does it reveal that the author published an article based on feelings instead of research?
If memory serves it was about 30 years in 2000, and much longer before that.
By contrast most of these mania lasted a lot longer.
YTD: +15.5%
1 year: +9%
Since inception (Oct 2024): +14%
Comparing that with S&P500
YTD: +16.7%
1 year: +13%
Since XMAG inception: +18%
The article should start with such a comparison but it just seems like a lot of text with very little numerical comparison, which makes it not very useful to conclude what the case is.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/24/sp500-sto...
This gives 4% real value growthy for XMAG - and 5.2% for MAG7. It also needs to account that Trump's election and the tariff craziness was almost exactly a year ago, so the numbers might be a bit unreliable.
This raises interesting questions about the profitability of AI - if AI was economically valuable, we'd see network effects on companies that produce AI inputs - power, datacenter, servers etc. or other companies becoming more valuable as a result which doesn't seem to be tha case.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/24/sp500-sto...
If you take the Top 500 companies as an indicator how well your economy is doing, but everything is carried on the shoulders of only 1.4% of those 500 companies then what is the point of looking at the 500 companies in the first place.
Make an S&P10 then instead. or in addition to the S&P500
That would probably be a good way to look at it anyway. Looking at the trend of the S&P10 vs. S&P500 and if they agree then thumbs up, but if they disagree then things might not be as rosy as everyone thinks
This is one reason people are so concerned with companies going public later. If they just appear in their fully formed embodiments then you can only capture their growth after they are large and their death.
But it kinda misses what the S&P is in my pov. An index tracking how the value of those companies developed over the years measures by what you would have now if you would have invested in each of them
Also, cap weighting reduces your need to trade and thus your overhead and tax costs.
It's valid to argue that success of companies in the S&P 500 is not evenly distributed, but if you really want to understand the impact of that distribution on the economy you have to look at the value of each company rather than treating them equally.
The top 7 companies might only be 1.4% of the companies in the S&P 500, but they represent roughly 35% of the market cap of companies in the index. Because of that, they have an impact on the broader economy much larger than the raw number of companies would suggest. "Just" Nvidia doing well is going to have a much larger economic impact than just Newell Brands, which I have never heard of but is apparently one of the smallest on the index. In fact Nvidia's market cap is roughly 1000 that of Newell Brands with presumably similarly disproportionate economic impact.
How do you pick these 10? After the fact, necessarily. So then meaningless for tracking the economy.
The interesting thing is that the aggregate market gains are almost entirely concentrated in those stocks. It's not a statement about sorting, it's a statement about distribution.
Isn't the interesting question now: what follows? Or does history end with Mag7?
Over longer periods, the top companies by market cap tend to change though. https://www.investmentnews.com/equities/only-one-of-the-worl...
So if you want to invest in the top companies, you either need to think they won’t change anymore, or you need to find when to buy and sell. Index funds solve this problem for you, albeit with slightly lower returns in the short term.
Or go with a NASDAQ 100 index: you'll generally get higher returns than the S&P 500 or Russell 3000, but you'll also get higher volatility. How well would you sleep at night with drops of -20% more often?
* https://www.investopedia.com/nasdaq-100-or-s-and-p-500-the-b...
Reminder that US stocks can do badly (and the only thing that could save US domestic investors is bonds):
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2010/12/17/the-lost-de...
You'll be more exposed to screwing things up when companies enter/leave.
they won't even show a chart in the article. 493 is up ... look at a 2025 5y chart. not that "basically flat" (actually 2023) chart google tries to feed you as a top result.
The thing is, there are three distinct interpretations of the word "economy", and depending on which of the definitions you subscribe (or belong) to, either of "the economy is good/okay/bad" can be true!
1) being the economy for the (uber) rich, "big tech", "big seven", FAANG, however you want to call it. That economy is running hot on 'roids "thanks" to the AI ouroboros / bubble / incestuous investment relationships. Money printer go brr. You get it. The only thing you have to take care about now if you belong to that bubble is to slowly unwind enough bags onto clueless retail gamblers before the bubble pops.
2) being the economy for the pension funds, the value of all the "dumb capital", S&P 500/DAX/MSCI and the likes. That economy is doing ... okay-ish, partially thanks to the AI bubble, but when that bubble pops, it's going to have Covid/2007ff effects on the pension funds.
3) being the economy for the 99% - and that economy is in the gutter. On the income side, job losses run rampant across the board, especially "entry level" jobs but also skilled jobs like translators are getting wiped out by AI, and in other industries (advertising, "luxury" goods) the cause is people cutting back on spending because they don't have any money left or are holding their money together because they fear a serious macro-economic disaster. On the expense side, cost of living have been exploding for years without adequate salary hikes - rents, basic groceries, cable TV and its replacement of half a dozen of streaming services, gas, electricity, the impact of Trump's tariffs, whatever.
Not recognizing (or ignoring) these wildly different realities is what killed Trump 1, Biden and is now killing Trump 2. You can't go and yap on the big screen about the economy being at record highs while the actual reality on the ground is everything but that. And it's not just the US that has these problems either, it's the same across the board in Western countries. The only thing the US has "exclusively" is the tariffs.
The consistent message from social media in the last 10 years is: don't try to talk sense. That will be punished.
Your comment wasn't sane, it was literally just what I quoted and one additional sentence of unsubstantiated rambling.
* https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/indices/equity/sp-500-equa...
* https://www.ishares.com/ch/professionals/en/products/328658/...
* https://www.invesco.com/ca/en/financial-products/etfs/invesc...
US equity markets / stocks look to have outperformed other markets over the last few years, it may be more that US tech stocks have been the outperformers (rather than US stocks generally):
> Looking at this data, there are two distinct periods of extended U.S. outperformance—the late 1990s and today. And what do these two periods have in common? The rise of U.S. technology stocks. Bespoke Investment Group recently created this chart illustrating this phenomenon:
> Now that the U.S. technology sector makes up over 30% of the S&P 500 (as it did back in 2000), this begs the question: Is U.S. outperformance just a technological fad?
* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/do-you-need-to-own-internationa...
Reminder that US stocks can do badly (and the only thing that could save US domestic investors is bonds):
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2010/12/17/the-lost-de...
nektro•2mo ago
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