When is the last time a company was more than ~5% of the S&P, as XOM is currently? It wasn’t MSFT as that only got up to I think 4.5% ish… ANYONE?
Not sure, but Cisco at some point had the largest market cap in the market.
Come on JoeyD I know you have this answer in the back of your head…
Cisco was once the largest company in the world with over $500 billion market cap. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco You do the rest.
Microsoft hit $586B in 2000 GE used to be on the heavy hitter lists as well.
Yeah but I dont think any breached the 5.5% that XOM is now of S&P 500…
S&P was around the 1500 mark in 2000 - or around 65% higher than it is now - so a stock would have needed to be near enough to a trillion dollar market cap to equal Exxon’s weighting today.
Yes in recent years, but I’m talking prior to late 90’s when S&P was at the these levels or lower. I only have daily/monthly S&P analytics back to '99.
I see what you’re saying. If I was to guess I would say Standard Oil back before it was split up. It was basically Exxon and all the other US major oil companies combined. According to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_wealthy_historical_figures Rockefeller had a personal fortune worth $330bn in today’s money. I’m not sure what his shareholding in Standard Oil was, but even if it was 100% that might be enough to give it a larger weighting than Exxon has today if the market was smaller after adjusting for inflation - which I would guess it was by a considerable margin.
Carson Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I see what you’re saying. If I was to guess I > would say Standard Oil back before it was split > up. It was basically Exxon and all the other US > major oil companies combined. > > According to this > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_wealthy_ > historical_figures Rockefeller had a personal > fortune worth $330bn in today’s money. I’m not > sure what his shareholding in Standard Oil was, > but even if it was 100% that might be enough to > give it a larger weighting than Exxon has today if > the market was smaller after adjusting for > inflation - which I would guess it was by a > considerable margin. I wasn’t going to say that cause technically Exxon IS Standard Oil.
bigwilly Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Come on JoeyD I know you have this answer in the > back of your head… I don’t even follow this now. If you asked what % XOM was of the S&P, I would have said “I dunno. I guess I can get that number”
I’m having trouble finding any figures but I’m gonna put it out there that the value of Homestake Mining stock increased 500% in a period when the rest of the market fell 90%, so there’s a chance that they could have had this kind of weight in the market during the Great Depression. They are now Barrick Gold. Even if it only had a market weight of 0.1% before the market crash, it would be as large as 5% of the market after the crash.
Why did its value increase 500% in the great depression? I don’t know the history there at all.
Gold Standard meant that gold was a good hedge for deflation. Probably why the Great Depression lasted so long was because that didn’t make any sense on the grand scale. The value of inflation adjusted gold was over $2000 in the early 30s.