Current and Future Mega-Caps

Ten years ago in May 2015, Apple (AAPL) was the largest public company in the US with a market cap of $760 billion.At that time, no other stock in the S&P 500 had a market cap above $400 billion, and the ten largest stocks in the index had a combined market cap of about $3.5 trillion.  

Fast forward ten years to today, and the ten largest stocks in the S&P have a combined market cap of $19.8 trillion, and Microsoft (MSFT) alone has a market cap of $3.42 trillion. 

There are currently nine stocks in the "$1+ Trillion Market Cap" club, and there are another 15 stocks with market caps above $300 billion. 

These 24 stocks are shown below:

For each of the stocks above, we include its annualized total return over the last ten years as well as where it ranked in the S&P 500 (if it was in the index) by market cap back then.

Of the ten largest stocks right now, there are five that ranked in the top ten back in May 2015: MSFT, AAPL, GOOGL, BRK-B, and WMT. 

Amazon (AMZN) and Meta (META) were knocking on the door of the top ten back in 2015, while Broadcom (AVGO) was only the 130th largest stock at the time and NVIDIA (NVDA) ranked 361st. 

Tesla (TSLA) -- currently the 7th largest stock in the S&P -- wasn't in the index ten years ago.  

The 17 largest stocks in the S&P have all posted an annualized gain of more than 13% over the last ten years, with NVIDIA (NVDA) by far the best at +73.9%. 

The eight largest stocks have all posted annualized gains of 20%+ over the last ten years.It's hard to imagine a repeat of that over the next ten years. 

Based on history, it's highly likely that we'll see at least a few stocks currently in the top ten get replaced by new up-and-comers. 

Take a look at the 14 stocks above with market caps between $300-$800 billion and think about which ones might be the next to enter the "$1 Trillion Market Cap" club.

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