One of the biggest challenges market analysts have is how to visualize the companies that make up the S&P 500 (Index: SPX). These firms range in size from the largest, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), which at this writing has grown to a market capitalization of around $3 trillion, to the smallest, Fortrea Holdings (NYSE: FTRE), which just barely qualified to make it into the index with a market cap of $2.85 billion after being spun off from Labcorp (NYSE: LH) last week.

Altogether, there are 505 firms that make up the S&P 500. There have been since January 2015 when Standard and Poor included additional share classes of five S&P 500 firms whose own market capitalizations met the index' requirements for inclusion.

That very big difference between the market capitalization of the biggest and smallest firms of the market-cap weighted index makes it very difficult to visually compare the firms that make up the S&P 500. Rising to the challenge, Visual Capitalist's Dorothy Neufield has worked out a useful approach, grouping the firms within their industrial sector to illustrate their relative sizes. Here's her chart, which represents a snapshot of the index as it existed on 5 May 2023:

She's since followed up with another visualization featuring the most profitable companies within each industrial sector. Before you click over, see if you can guess which firms are from their relative sizes in this visualization.

Reference

Dorothy Neufield. Visualizing Every Company on the S&P 500 Index. Visual Capitalist. [Online Article]. 21 June 2023.

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