Many stock markets have delivered strong returns thus far in 2024, but the US continues to dominate, compounding more than a decade of outperformance. Indeed, much has been written about the narrowness of stock market returns, with the US beating all regions, technology beating all sectors, and the Magnificent Seven of Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla trouncing, well, almost everything. In fact, an equal-weighted index of these seven shares has returned an annualised 47% over the last five years, roughly triple the S&P 500’s very healthy 16% (Figure 1). To put this into perspective, $1m invested in the Magnificent Seven five years ago would now be worth $6.8m, compared to $2.1m if invested in the S&P 500 and $1.3m if split equally across the five other indices shown in Figure 1.

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