Contrary to the dominant narrative focused on US tech giants, data shows European banks and a global deep value approach have outperformed the 'Mag 7' over the last one, three, and five years. This highlights the importance of looking beyond popular headlines for actual investment performance.
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Daniel Gladys argues that as passive investing grows, fewer participants focus on fundamentals. This widens the gap between a stock's price and its intrinsic value, creating a favorable environment for disciplined value investors who can identify these overlooked opportunities.
The perception of a market rally driven solely by a few tech stocks is misleading. The S&P 500 excluding the top 10 companies has seen strong earnings growth and consistent ~15% annual returns for the past three years, indicating broad market health.
Big Tech's sustained outperformance presents a portfolio anomaly. These companies are simultaneously the largest market components and among the fastest-growing, a rare combination that breaks historical patterns where size implies maturity and slower growth, forcing managers to adapt.
The underperformance of active managers in the last decade wasn't just due to the rise of indexing. The historic run of a few mega-cap tech stocks created a market-cap-weighted index that was statistically almost impossible to beat without owning those specific names, leading to lower active share and alpha dispersion.
The current market is not a simple large-cap story. Since 2015, the S&P 100 has massively outperformed the S&P 500. Within that, the Magnificent 7 have doubled the performance of the other 93 stocks, indicating extreme market concentration rather than a broad-based rally in large companies.
The AI investment case might be inverted. While tech firms spend trillions on infrastructure with uncertain returns, traditional sector companies (industrials, healthcare) can leverage powerful AI services for a fraction of the cost. They capture a massive 'value gap,' gaining productivity without the huge capital outlay.
After years of piling into a few dominant mega-cap tech stocks, large asset managers have reached a point of peak centralization. To generate future growth, they will be forced to allocate capital to different, smaller pockets of the market, potentially signaling a broad market rotation.
While indexing made competition tougher, the true headwind for active managers was the unprecedented, concentrated performance of a few tech giants. Not owning them was statistically devastating, while owning them reduced active share, creating a no-win scenario for many funds.
When a few high-flying stocks like the 'Mag-7' dominate the market, capital is pulled from other sectors, creating cyclical valuation discounts. Stable industries like healthcare can become as cheap relative to the S&P 500 as they were during the 2000 tech bubble, presenting a contrarian investment opportunity.
The top investment idea for the year is European equities, specifically quality stocks. This is based on a favorable combination of accelerating earnings growth, supportive fiscal and monetary policy, and more attractive valuations compared to US markets, particularly when analyzing EPS growth plus dividend yield versus P/E multiples.
