Political Calculations' initial estimate of the total value of new home sales in the United States during July 2026 is $28.41 billion. This value is slightly lower than the initial estimate of $28.62 billion we presented in our previous update that covered new home sales data through May 2026.

Since then, the number of new home sales has been trending downward thanks largely to an increase in mortgage rates in recent months, which has made new homes relatively less affordable during this time. The number of new home sales has dropped to its lowest level since the start of the year.

One surprising development however is that the average new home sale prices has also declined in recent months. Builder incentives are making new homes less expensive than existing homes.

As far back as modern records go, newly built homes have almost always cost more than previously owned homes.

It only makes sense: New homes are expected to have far fewer maintenance issues, brand new appliances, and designs suited to contemporary tastes, plus they can be customized to suit the homebuyer's needs.

After all, it is only in very rare circumstances that a used car would cost more than a similar make and model purchased brand new at the dealer's lot.

But in recent months, that trend has been upended to an extent that has never been seen, with the typical new home selling at a sharp discount to existing homes.

In June, the $407,200 median sales price of new homes was about $28,000 less than for existing homes, a 6.5% discount and by far the biggest inversion in at least 25 years.

Last month, the gap narrowed a bit to nearly $19,000, or 4%—still significantly larger than any discount seen before this year. July also marked the fourth straight month of price inversion for new homes, the longest stretch on record.

The following charts present the U.S. new home market capitalization, the number of new home sales, and their average sale prices as measured by their time-shifted, trailing twelve month averages from January 1976 through July 2026.

New home sales trending down:

New home prices also trending down:

We'll update our measure of the relative affordability of new homes sometime in the next week.

References

U.S. Census Bureau. New Residential Sales Historical Data. Houses Sold. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 25 August 2026. 

U.S. Census Bureau. New Residential Sales Historical Data. Median and Average Sale Price of Houses Sold. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 25 August 2026. 

Image Credit: An aerial view of a lot of houses photo by Modunite Ltd on Unsplash.

There are thirty stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Index: DJI), the U.S. stock market's oldest running index. Unlike the S&P 500 (Index: SPX), the market capitalization-weighted index that's overtaken it as standard for measuring the performance of the U.S. stock market, the component stocks of the DJI are weighted according to their price.

For example, the stock of Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) has the heaviest weight within the index, accounting for 11.72% of its value on 27 July 2026 thanks to its highest-in-the-index share price of $1,041.82.

With a share price of $837.24, Caterpillar (NYSE: CAT) ranks second, making up 9.42% of the index. The third largest component stock of the DJI belongs to United Health (NYSE: UNH), whose share price of $427.54 gives it a 4.8% share of the entire Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The following chart visualizes the relative share of each of the DJI's 30 component stocks within the index:

We wondered how this chart would change if the thirty Dow Jones Industrial component stocks were weighted within the index according to their market capitalization. The next chart shows the results of that exercise, keeping the order and coloring of the component stock shares the same as the price-weighted visualization:

The DJI's top three components of Goldman Sachs, Caterpillar, and United Health go from accounting for a combined 25.94% of the index to just 4.23%. In their place, the top three component stocks of become Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), which would account for 49.7% of the entire DJI's valuation.

References

Slickcharts. Dow Jones Industrial Average: Price Weighting of Component Stocks and Market Capitalization. 27 July 2026.

The market capitalization of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) rebounded strongly in the second quarter of 2026 after having shrunk by 1.5% in the first.

Since that Spring 2026 snapshot, the index's 503 stocks added $8.74 trillion to its total valuation, rising just shy of 15% over its market capitalization of three months earlier to reach a record high market cap of a shade over $67.185 trillion.

The index' top ten stocks contributed a little over a third of the index' total increase in value. Altogether, the combined market cap of these ten stocks account for 36.5% of the total value of the S&P 500, which believe it or not, represents a small decline from the 36.9% share they held at the end of March 2026.

The following chart shows the relative shares of the top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 at the end of the second quarter of 2026.

There has also been a change in the membership of the S&P 500's Top 10 stocks. Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU has displaced Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.B) from the tenth spot. Here are the approximate market capitalizations of each of the S&P 500's top ten component firms at the end of trading on 30 June 2026:

• Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) $4,743,261,533,736 (7.06%)
• Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) $4,185,625,970,988 (6.23%)
• Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) $2,774,740,812,228 (4.13%)
• Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) $2,539,593,285,768 (3.78%)
• Alphabet (A) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) $2,217,105,249,480 (3.30%)
• Alphabet (C) (NASDAQ: GOOG) $2,055,861,231,336 (3.06%)
• Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) $1,760,247,198,072 (2.62%)
• Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) $1,551,973,674,636 (2.31%)
• Meta Platforms (A) (NASDAQ: META) $1,417,603,659,516 (2.11%)
• Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU) $1,249,641,140,616 (1.86%)

Aside from Micron Technology's incredible ~750% year-long ascent to become one of index' Top 10 component stocks, there was some low level jockeying in the ranks of these most highly valued U.S. stocks. Meta Platforms dropped two positions from sixth to eighth as the company's missteps with its investments in AI technology proved costlier than anticipated, while both Broadcom and Tesla moved up one slot into the gaps left behind.

The S&P 500 now has 12 stocks for 11 companies whose market capitalizations exceed the trillion dollar level. Although no longer part of the index' top ten stocks, Berkshire Hathaway retained its trillion dollar valuation, while shares of Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY) rose to tie it for 11th place.

References

Standard and Poor. S&P 500 Factsheet. [PDF Document]. 30 June 2026. Accessed 1 July 2026.

SlickCharts. S&P 500 Component Weights. 30 June 2026. Accessed 1 July 2026.

The market capitalization of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) shrank in the first quarter of 2026. Picking up from our Fall 2025 snapshot when the index' market cap was $59.32 trillion, as of the end of 2026-Q1, it has fallen nearly 1.5% to $58.44 trillion for this Spring 2026 snapshot.

In between then and now, the S&P 500's market cap clocked in with a market cap of $60.80 trillion at the end of 2025-Q4, which is the value we would have reported in our Winter 2025 snapshot had we presented it. In the three months since, the total valuation of all 503 stocks included in the S&P 500 has dropped 3.9%.

Much of the change in the index's value during this time was concentrated within the top ten component stocks that make up the benchmark index. At the end of 2025-Q3, they represented 38.9% of the value of the entire index, which increased to 39.2% at the end of 2025-Q4. After the end of 2026-Q1 however, their share of the index has declined to 36.9%.

The following chart shows the relative shares of the top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 at the end of the first quarter of 2026.

Here are the approximate market capitalizations of each of the S&P 500's top ten component firms at the end trading on 31 March 2026:

• Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) $4,184,635,901,084 (7.16%)
• Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) $3,641,100,791,027 (6.23%)
• Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) $2,700,142,159,638 (4.62%)
• Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) $2,226,740,612,169 (3.81%)
• Alphabet (A) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) $1,829,317,090,837 (3.13%)
• Alphabet (C) (NASDAQ: GOOG) $1,694,894,429,210 (2.90%)
• Meta Platforms (A) (NASDAQ: META) $1,449,426,960,152 (2.48%)
• Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) $1,449,426,960,152 (2.48%)
• Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) $1,396,826,788,211 (2.39%)
• Berkshire Hathaway (B) (NYSE: BRK.B) $1,005,247,730,428 (1.72%)

All ten of these firms have trillion dollar market caps, with Berkshire Hathaway joining the trillion-dollar club during the past six months.

References

Standard and Poor. S&P 500 Factsheet. [PDF Document]. 31 March 2026. Accessed 1 April 2026.

SlickCharts. S&P 500 Component Weights. Accessed 1 April 2026.

The seven companies that make up the S&P 500's "Magnificent Seven" stocks have been on the rise for some time.

Two years ago, they combined to account for 30% of the total valuation of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX). And to be sure, several of the members of this elite group of high-flying companies were already among the biggest components of the index before they became collectively known as the "Magnificent 7". The weren't known by that label until 2023, when Bank of American analyst Michael Hartnett first deployed the phrase with respect to "a basket of seven stocks: Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Meta Platforms (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA) and Tesla (TSLA)".

Since then, these mega-cap stocks have earned the moniker by growing even larger. Through October 2025, they have collectively grown to account for 37% of the entire market capitalization of the S&P 500.

Pretty amazing stuff when you realize that Tesla wasn't even a publicly-traded company until 2010 and Nvidia's explosive growth because of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabling computer chip technology began in 2023.

The following pair of charts illustrate the growth of the Magnificent Seven stocks over the past two years. The first chart shows how their value has increased and driven the growth of the S&P 500 index itself. The second chart shows how their collective share of the S&P 500 index has likewise grown.

They're able to drive the total valuation of the S&P 500 because their market capitalizations make up such a large share of the index. In today's market, what happens to the S&P 500 index is almost all about what's happening with the Magnificent Seven stocks.

How long might that last? Time will tell, but it helps put today's record concentration of market capitalization by seven companies into some context, the last time the S&P 500 index (or rather, its predecessor index, the S&P 90) had such a large percentage of its total value represented by such a small number of stocks was back in 1932.

References

Follow the links for the tickers of the Magnificent Seven stocks we posted in the article to our sources for their market capitalization. Meanwhile, here's our source for the S&P 500's monthly market capitalization:

Standard and Poor. S&P Market Attributes Web File. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 3 November 2025.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "A picture of a large electronic screen showing the tickers NVDA, AAPL, MSFT, GOOG, AMZN, META, and TSLA, and the words 'MAGNIFICENT 7'".

As the third quarter of 2025 ended, the market capitalization of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) added up to $59.32 trillion.

Four weeks later, Slickcharts estimated the total market cap of the index adds up to $62.25 trillion.

Yesterday, the three biggest component stocks of the index, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) had one of their best trading days. NVDA's stock flirted with reaching a $5 trillion valuation, while the stocks of both Microsoft and Apple both surpassed $4 trillion in market value during the trading day, only for AAPL shares to fall below the level by the close.

Together, these three stocks alone account for more than one-fifth of the total value of the S&P 500 index. The following chart gives an indication of how much of the index' total market cap is accounted for by these three $4+ trillion firms.

Going into the trading day of 29 October 2025, it looks likely that NVDA will soon become the world's first $5 trillion company. FXStreet estimates that will officially happen when NVDA's share price closes above $205.36.

Our own back-of-the-envelope math using Slickcharts' market cap data for the S&P 500 and NVDA's relative share of the index suggest the stock would have to close at or above $205.44 per share to reach that threshold, which is definitely in the same ballpark. Regardless of the actual stock price at which it happens, when combined with two other companies joining NVDA in the $4+ trillion valuation club, it's kind of the stock market equivalent of seeing a three-planet conjunction in the sky. It doesn't really mean anything, but it's cool to see happen for the first time ever all the same.

The market capitalization of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) grew by 13% during the third quarter of 2025, more than double the pace it rose during the preceding quarter.

According to Standard and Poor, the index closed out 2025-Q3 with a market cap of nearly $59.32 trillion. This figure represents an increase of $6.82 trillion from the $52.50 trillion S&P reported at the end of 2025-Q2.

Over 56% of the total gain in the S&P 500's market cap was delivered by its top 10 component stocks. Together, these 10 stocks account for 38.9% of the entire valuation of the index, a record high concentration.

The overall membership of the Top 10 stocks of the S&P 500 is unchanged this quarter, but there have been some changes in the relative rankings of the bottom three stocks of the table.

The following chart shows the relative shares of the top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 at the end of the second quarter of 2025.

Here are the approximate market capitalizations of each of the S&P 500's top ten component firms at the end trading on 30 September 2025:

• Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) $4,733,844,220,324 (7.98%)
• Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) $4,003,323,779,663 (6.75%)
• Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) $3,929,288,628,536 (6.62%)
• Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) $2,215,800,814,217 (3.74%)
• Meta Platforms (A) (NASDAQ: META) $1,656,272,653,214 (2.79%)
• Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) $1,613,514,964,354 (2.72%)
• Alphabet (A) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) $1,470,425,649,566 (2.48%)
• Tesla (NYSE: TSLA) $1,297,642,736,446 (2.19%)
• Alphabet (C) (NASDAQ: GOOG) $1,182,620,660,455 (1.99%)
• Berkshire Hathaway (B) (NASDAQ: BRK.B) $958,603,483,954 (1.62%)

One important thing to note is that nine of the top ten stocks within the index have valuations in excess of $1 trillion. Only Berkshire Hathaway falls below that still exclusive club.

The index' top-most valued stock, Nvidia, saw its market cap rise enough to account for 8% of the index by itself. Microsoft saw its share of the index dip by a quarter percent to 6.75%, while Apple's share increased from 5.84% to 6.62%.

The next four firms saw small changes in their individual market capitalizations, with Amazon and Meta Platforms losing some relative share of the index' total valuation and Broadcom and Class A shares of Alphabet gaining.

That brings us to where the rankings changed. Both Tesla and Class C shares of Alphabet moved up one slot to eighth and ninth place respectively, while Berkshire Hathaway dropped two positions into the tenth position.

All ten of the S&P 500's Top 10 stocks grew their market capitalizations during 2025-Q3.

Six months ago, the AI-bubble of the preceding two years had all but deflated, but with Nvidia's surge in valuation during 2025-Q2 and 2025-Q3, it appears to have reinflated and expanded.

References

Standard and Poor. S&P Market Attributes. [Excel Spreadsheet]. 30 September 2025. Accessed 1 October 2025.

Political Calculations' initial estimate of the total valuation of U.S. new home sales in July 2025 is $29.68 billion.

This estimate is up about one percent from Political Calculations' initial estimate of $29.37 billion for June 2025. That month's estimate however has been revised upward to $29.41 billion this month. The initial estimate for July 2025 is 0.9% above this revised level.

These figures are time-shifted, partial trailing twelve month averages. The initial estimate for any given month is based on the U.S. Census Bureau's estimated annualized number of new home sales multiplied by their average price for that month, which is averaged with the data for the preceding six months. These total valuation (or new home market capitalization) estimates are then updated as each new month's data is added to it, until it covers a full twelve months worth of data, and as older data is revised, which continues until that data is finalized some 10 months after the month for which the data applies.

The benefit of this approach is that it 'centers' the trailing average in something closer to real time, which makes it easier to tell when changes in trend take place. The following charts present the U.S. new home market capitalization, the number of new home sales, and their sale prices as measured by their time-shifted, trailing twelve month averages from January 1976 through July 2025. The data through July 2025 indicates the new home market cap is rising mainly due to average sale prices being elevated in recent months even as the number of sales has trended downward during this period.

New home sales in downward trend:

Flat trend for prices at elevated level:

Reuters reports the number of new homes sold in July 2025 fell after the previous month's sales numbers were revised sharply upward:

Sales of new U.S. single-family homes fell in July following a sharp upward revision to the prior month's sales pace, and the overall trend remained consistent with a housing market struggling in an environment of high mortgage rates.

The report from the Commerce Department on Monday bolstered economists' expectations that the housing market slump could persist through the end of the year. Though mortgage rates have eased on expectations that the Federal Reserve would resume cutting interest rates in September, they continue to outpace wage growth, pushing home ownership beyond the reach of many.

That's not quite correct, as new home prices in recent months have been moving toward becoming affordable for the first time in more than three years. At this time, they remain out of reach for the typical American household, which we'll explore in more detail in a separate analysis in upcoming weeks.

References

U.S. Census Bureau. New Residential Sales Historical Data. Houses Sold. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 26 August 2025. 

U.S. Census Bureau. New Residential Sales Historical Data. Median and Average Sale Price of Houses Sold. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 26 August 2025. 

Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "A newly constructed two-story suburban house with beige siding and a dark gray gabled roof. The house features white trim, a large arched window on the second floor, a white double garage door, and a black front door with a small porch. The front yard has a neatly manicured green lawn with small shrubs near the foundation. A concrete driveway extends from the garage all the way to the street. In the foreground, a red and white "NEW HOME FOR SALE" sign is staked into the grass of the front yard, supported by a white wooden post. The sky is bright blue with scattered white clouds, and a line of trees is visible in the background." Note: This image went through multiple iterations. So many, in fact, we asked Copilot to write a prompt for generating the final result.

When financial analysts talk about the biggest or most valuable publicly-traded companies in the world, they mean the companies that have the largest market capitalization. Called market cap for short, this is the number you get when you take the price of a company's stock and multiply it by the number of shares of stock it has issued. It represents the total valuation of the company.

When stocks are grouped together into an index, like the S&P 500 (Index: SPX), they are often weighted within the index according to their market cap. For example, the biggest company in the world in July 2025 is Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has a market cap of over $4 trillion by itself. When combined with the 502 other companies that make up the S&P 500 index, it alone accounts for about 7% of the entire value of the index. As a result, even relatively moderate changes in the price of NVDA's stock will have a significant influence over how the value of the index changes from day-to-day.

We were curious to see if there's a relationship between a company's market cap and its dividend yield. It can be argued there should be because whenever dividends are paid, it directly shrinks a company's market capitalization by the total amount of dividends paid. The total amount of dividends paid is equal to the dividend per share multiplied by the number of shares of stock the comapny has issued. When you divide those total dividends paid by the company's market cap, the result is called the dividend yield. Because the number of shares issued by a company appears in both the numerator and denominator of that math, the dividend yield can be more simply described as result of the dividends per share divided by the company's share price.

We tapped FinViz' data visualization tools for all the companies that make up the S&P 500 index to produce the following chart plotting the market cap for each company against its dividend yield.

Looking at this chart, it seems there is an inverse relationship between the companies with the largest market capitalizatons and their dividend yield. Which is to say that as market cap rises, dividend yields get smaller.

That's somewhat misleading because what the chart is really showing is that the megacap companies tend to have some of the lowest dividend yields. Since there aren't that many companies that qualify as megacap firms, there's not much of a statistical basis to support that impression.

To see what we mean, we regenerated the chart to exclude any companies whose market caps exceeded $200 billion, which excludes megacap firms according to FinViz' definition. Here's the visual result:

Excluding the megacaps from the visualization has the effect of eliminating the appearance of a significant inverse relationship between market cap and dividend yield. While there are some high dividend yield outliers in the upper left hand corner of the chart, we recognize the firms, Dow Chemical (NYSE: DOW) and LyondellBasell Industries (NYSE: LYB) are both chemical industry firms whose stock prices have recently plunged because of distress within their industry and factors that apply uniquely for each firm. Their dividend yields can be considered to be high in this snapshot from 22 July 2025 because they haven't yet adjusted their dividends to compensate for the negative changes in their near-term prospects for profitability. [Update: Since we took this snapshot, Dow Chemical slashed its dividend.] [Update 20 February 2026: LyondellBasell Industries has finally slashed its dividend!]

On the whole, we find little evidence to support an inverse relationship between market cap and dividend yield for the S&P 500's stocks. This assessment generally agrees with what others have found in looking at other stock markets.

Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "a picture of colored circles in the style of FinViz' market cap vs dividend yield bubble chart on a black background".

The market capitalization of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) rose almost 6.3% during the second quarter of 2025. Standard and Poor reports the index ended 2025-Q2 with a market cap of $52.50 trillion, a net gain of $3.09 trillion from the $49.41 trillion recorded at the end of 2025-Q1.

A little under four-fifths of the increase in market cap was concentrated within the top 10 stocks of the index, whose membership was unchanged from the end of the preceding quarter. The remaining 493 stocks that make up the market capitalization-weighted index contributed a little over one-fifth of the overall increase in the S&P 500's total valuation. Together, these 493 stocks collectively increased in value by almost $444 billion.

But the S&P 500's top 10 stocks increased in value by $2.649 trillion over the preceding quarter. Their disproportionate gain resulted in their share of the index increasing from 33.6% of its total value to 36.6%. Their share of the index is not as concentrated as it was at the end of 2024, but at $19.23 trillion, their combined value still represents an unusually large portion of the total market capitalization of the index.

The following chart shows the relative shares of the top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 at the end of the second quarter of 2025.

Here are the approximate market capitalizations of each of the S&P 500's top ten component firms at the end trading on 30 June 2025:

• Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) $3,852,990,130,563 (7.34%)
• Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) $3,697,021,711,167 (7.04%)
• Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) $3,064,383,420,526 (5.84%)
• Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) $2,072,918,104,171 (3.95%)
• Meta Platforms (A) (NASDAQ: META) $1,602,502,627,375 (3.05%)
• Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) $1,296,092,241,895 (2.47%)
• Alphabet (A) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) $1,025,658,600,035 (1.95%)
• Berkshire Hathaway (B) (NYSE: BRK.B) $890,773,329,538 (1.70%)
• Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) $890,156,928,206 (1.70%)
• Alphabet (C) (NASDAQ: GOOG) $832,799,928,629 (1.59%)

While the membership list of the Top 10 stocks within the S&P 500 didn't change from the end of the preceding quarter, their ranks within the Top 10 did undergo some substantial changes.

For example, Apple went from being the biggest publicly-traded company in the world, accounting for 7.01% of the total value of the S&P 500 to now be the third largest, with its share of the S&P 500's value dropping to 5.84%. As it fell, it effectively changed places with Nvidia in the ranking of the S&P 500's top 10 companies whose value soared during the final weeks of 2025-Q2. Since the end of 2025-Q2, Nvidia went on to become the world's first $4 trillion company.

Meanwhile, the second largest company in the world, Microsoft, held onto its second place position, although its market cap rose from representing 5.87% of the S&P 500's value to 7.04% of it.

The fourth and fifth-largest firms of the S&P 500, Amazon and Meta Platforms, also held onto their relative rankings, while their respective shares of the total valuation of the index increased. Amazon increased from a share of 3.77% to 3.95% of the S&P 500, while Meta Platforms' share of the S&P 500 grew from 2.65% to 3.05%.

There is a new six-largest company in the S&P 500. Shares of Broadcom increased in value from 1.65% of the index to 2.47%, allowing the company to displace the Class A shares of Alphabet (better known as Google) and Berkshire Hathaway, which dropped from #6 to #8 in the mid-2025 ranking. Aside from Apple, Berkshire Hathaway was the only member of the S&P 500's top 10 stocks to fall in value during the quarter, which saw its legendary CEO Warren Buffet finally retire.

Closing out the top 10, Tesla surpassed the Class C shares of Alphabet to claim the #9 slot in the Top 10. Alphabet's Class C shares saw the smallest change among the S&P 500's top 10 stocks, which was enough for the "other shares of Google" to still be included on the list.

Three months ago, the AI-bubble of the preceding two years had all but deflated, but with Nvidia's surge during 2025-Q2, it would seem to be back with a vengeance. The rapid development of Artificial Intelligence technologies and its impact on the U.S. stock market is still among the biggest stories ever in market history.

References

Standard and Poor. S&P Market Attributes. [Excel Spreadsheet]. 30 June 2025. Accessed 1 July 2025.

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) became the world's first publicly-traded company to clock a $4 trillion market cap during intraday trading on 9 July 2025.

That's a big deal because NVDA recently vaulted past two other megacaps to claim the title. In recent years, both Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) jockeyed for the title of being the world's biggest publicly-traded company, only to have Nvidia blow past them in just the last month.

The rise of NVDA is an ongoing major story, not just in the current headlines, but also in the history of stocks. Here's how CNBC reported today's milestone achievement:

Nvidia stock rose on Wednesday lifting the company’s market cap briefly past $4 trillion for the first time as investors scooped up shares of the tech giant that’s building the bulk of the hardware for the generative artificial intelligence boom.

However, Nvidia stock ended finishing the day only up 1.8%, giving the company a market cap of $3.97 trillion.

Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, surpassing Microsoft and Apple, both of which hit the $3 trillion mark before Nvidia. Microsoft is also one of Nvidia’s biggest and most important customers. The chipmaker is the first company to ever achieve this market value during trading.

What makes this accomplishment more amazing is that NVDA's market cap has been remarkably volatile in recent months, especially after 20 February 2025, when the company behind China's DeepSeek artificial intelligence system announced they would make their code open source. That hurt NVDA's market valuation because DeepSeek's AI-code doesn't need to run on Nvidia's powerful AI-chips.

NVDA's market cap went from $3.4 trillion on 20 February 2025 down to a low of $2.6 trillion on 10 March 2025. The stock recovered a bit after that, rising back to $2.96 trillion on 24 March 2025. But then it plunged again in the reaction to President Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff announcement on 2 April 2025. By 4 April 2025, NVDA's valuation totaled $2.30 trillion.

But then the company's valuation recovered, adding more than $1.7 trillion during the last three months, which has put in on the doorstep of a $4 trillion market capitalization.

We've updated the interactive chart we posted a year earlier to include the new $4 trillion benchmark.

The chart doesn't fully communicate the volatility of NVDA's market cap because it is based on snapshots of its total valuation as a percentage of the S&P 500's total market capitalization taken at roughly mid-year over the past 10 years, skipping over almost all of the volatility. As for where it stands today, the latest snapshot indicates NVDA's stock alone accounts for 7.07% of the total valuation of the S&P 500 index.

That in itself is remarkable because that's less that the 7.25% we estimated a year ago. What's happened since then is that the rest of the stocks that make up the index have increased their relative share of the total valuation of the index, while previous market cap champions AAPL and MSFT have lost some of theirs.

That's an underappreciated story in the U.S. stock market, which we'll revisit in the months ahead.

Disclaimer: Aside from long positions in funds that track the S&P 500 index, we don't hold any position of any kind in either NVDA, AAPL, or MSFT. We simply find these megacap stocks to be interesting because of their influence on the index.

Image credit: Microsoft Bing Image Creator. Prompt: "An artificial intelligence computer chip with the letters NVDA in the middle." We originally featured this image on 26 February 2024.

The market capitalization of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) shrank during the first quarter of 2025. Standard and Poor reports the index ended 2025-Q1 with a market cap of $49.41 trillion, a net decrease of $2.45 trillion (or 4.7%) from the $51.86 trillion recorded at the end of 2024-Q4.

Much of that decline was concentrated in the top 10 stocks that make up the market cap-weighted index, which collectively lost $2.78 trillion of their market capitalizations. The bottom 493 stocks that make up the index registered a net gain of $325 billion, which offset a portion of the losses registered by the index' ten biggest component stocks.

In percentage terms, the S&P 500's top 10 stocks went from accounting for 37.3% of the total valuation of the index to 33.6%. Their combined market capitalization is almost $16.58 trillion.

The following chart shows the relative shares of the top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 at the end of the first quarter of 2025.

Here are the approximate market capitalizations of each of the S&P 500's top ten component firms at the end trading on 31 March 2025:

• Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) $3,463,493,610,544 (7.01%)
• Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) $2,900,243,579,728 (5.87%)
• Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) $2,756,960,677,152 (5.58%)
• Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) $1,862,677,733,488 (3.77%)
• Meta Platforms (A) (NASDAQ: META) $1,309,309,282,160 (2.65%)
• Berkshire Hathaway (B) (NYSE: BRK.B) $1,012,861,897,520 (2.05%)
• Alphabet (A) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) $938,750,051,360 (1.90%)
• Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) $815,230,307,760 (1.65%)
• Alphabet (C) (NASDAQ: GOOG) $765,822,410,320 (1.55%)
• Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) $751,000,041,088 (1.52%)

All but one of these stocks saw their market caps decline during 2025-Q1. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) held onto its position as the most valuable company in the world as measured by its market cap, even though it dropped by 10%.

But there's a new Number 2 in this ranking. Or rather, an old Number 2, because Microsoft reclaimed the title of being the second-largest company in the S&P 500 despite its market cap falling by 10.7%. Meanwhile, former second-largest S&P 500 component Nvidia dropped to become the third-largest company in the index after its market cap dropped over 22% in value.

Amazon and Meta Platforms retained their respective fourth- and fifth-largest rankings within the index, despite market cap declines of 13% and 4% respectively.

Sixth place is now held by Berkshire Hathaway, which is the only one of the Top 10 components of the S&P 500 at the end of 2024 that saw its market cap increase during 2025-Q1. The company displaced Tesla, which saw the biggest percentage drop in its market cap among the top 10 index components, falling by 35% into tenth place.

The remaining three stocks, Alphabet (Class A shares), Broadcom, and Alphabet (Class C shares) clung to their seventh, eighth, and ninth place rankings, even though the Class A shares of Alphabet lost nearly 17% of their market cap, Broadcom lost 26%, and Class C shares of Alphabet lost over 19%.

All these losses took place before President Trump imposed global tariffs, which sent most stock prices plunging after 2 April 2025. Nearly all of the losses that occurred during 2025-Q1 took place after 21 February 2025, when the Chinese company behind the DeepSeek artificial intelligence system announced they would make its code open source the following week. That action effectively popped the AI bubble that had been inflating the value of the S&P 500 and many of its biggest component stocks through the end of the quarter.

The arrival of the global tariff war in April 2025 has since expanded the declines in the S&P 500's market capitalization beyond those stocks whose valuations had inflated with the AI bubble of the preceding two years. We'll see that impact in three months when we take our Summer 2025 snapshot of the S&P 500's market capitalization.

References

Standard and Poor. S&P Market Attributes. [Excel Spreadsheet]. 31 March 2025. Accessed 1 April 2025.

The market capitalization of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) increased by a little over 2.5% during the fourth quarter of 2024. According to Standard and Poor, the index ended 2024-Q4 with a market cap of $51.86 trillion.

Since the end of the third quarter of 2024, the value of the Top 10 stocks within the market cap-weighted index rose from representing 34.6% of the index' total value to 37.3%, which means these ten stocks account for $3 out of every $8 of the index' total value.

The combined market capitalization of the Top 10 firms of the S&P 500 increased from $17.51 trillion to $19.35 trillion.

Meanwhile, the other 493 firms that make up the index collectively fell by $525 billion. The market cap of all these other firms rounded up to a total of $32.51 trillion.

The following chart shows the relative shares of the top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 at the end of the 2024-Q4.

Here are the approximate market capitalizations of each of the S&P 500's top ten component firms at the end of 2025's first day of trading on Thursday, 2 January 2025:

• Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) $3,848,019,662,634 (7.42%)
• Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) $3,542,045,053,341 (6.83%)
• Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) $3,246,442,464,702 (6.26%)
• Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) $2,152,194,285,705 (4.15%)
• Meta Platforms (A) (NASDAQ: META) $1,363,920,716,001 (2.63%)
• Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) $1,156,480,302,921 (2.23%)
• Alphabet (A) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) $1,130,550,251,286 (2.18%)
• Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) $1,104,620,199,651 (2.13%)
• Alphabet (C) (NASDAQ: GOOG) $949,039,889,841 (1.83%)
• Berkshire Hathaway (B) (NYSE: BRK.B) $860,877,714,282 (1.66%)

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) retained its position as the most valuable company in the world as measured by its market cap.

However, since the end of September 2024, Nvidia has surpassed Microsoft to become the second largest firm of the index, while Microsoft now ranks third-largest. Notably, each of the Top 3 companies of the S&P 500 has a market cap in excess of $3 trillion.

There was no change in the rankings for the next two slots. Amazon held onto fourth place and Meta clung to fifth place. Perhaps the biggest change was Tesla, which boomed upward to become the sixth largest company within the S&P 500 with a market cap exceeding $1 trillion.

While the remaining firms saw their market caps rise, their relative position within the index dropped. Class A shares of Alphabet (formerly known as Google) came in seventh. Broadcom jumped into eighth place, Class C shares of Alphabet kept the ninth slot, while Berkshire Hathaway's position went from being the seventh largest firm of the S&P 500 to become the tenth largest.

References

Standard and Poor. S&P Market Attributes. [Excel Spreadsheet]. 31 December 2024. Accessed 2 January 2025.

September 2024's new home sales were remarkably strong when compared to the muted numbers reported a month earlier.

The U.S. Census Bureau's initial estimate of the annualized number of sales in September 2024 was 738,000. If that number holds, that would be the second highest figure reported since February 2022's finalized estimate of 773,000 new homes sold. The next month, new home sales plunged as the Federal Reserve began a series of rate hikes, which forced mortgage rates to rise.

In reporting September 2024's numbers, Reuters attributed the increase in sales to a decline in mortgage rates down to the 6% level during the month as the Federal Reserve acted to cut interest rates for the first time since 2020.

The three following charts track the trends for the U.S. new home market capitalization, the number of new home sales, and their sale prices as measured by their time-shifted, trailing twelve month averages from January 1976 through September 2024.

New home sales trending up:

Prices on slow downtrend, but elevated:

September 2024's initial estimate of the market cap for the U.S. new home market is $30.59 billion, which is less than the initial estimate of $31.06 billion for August. However, both August 2024's number of estimated sales and the average sale price of new homes sold was revised lower, pushing that month's estimated market capitalization for the U.S. new home market down to $30.46 billion.

We suspect October 2024's numbers are going to look quite different. That's because mortgage rates have rebounded during the last several weeks, erasing a large portion of the reduction in interest rates that boosted sales in September.

That may be quite a headwind for the U.S. new home market. We'll find out more in a month.

References

U.S. Census Bureau. New Residential Sales Historical Data. Houses Sold. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 24 October 2024. 

U.S. Census Bureau. New Residential Sales Historical Data. Median and Average Sale Price of Houses Sold. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 24 October 2024. 

Image credit: New Home Construction by Paul Brennan on PublicDomainPictures. Creative Commons CCO Public Domain.