The S&P 500 consists of 500 companies that issue a total of 505 stocks, as some companies, such as Berkshire Hathaway, have issued multiple classes of shares. The top 10 largest holdings are listed on the official Standard & Poor’s website. However, S&P does not currently provide the total list of holdings, at least not for free. Subscribers to S&P’s research unit, Capital IQ, can get access to the entire list.
Key Takeaways
- A constituent is a member or component of a market index like the S&P 500.
- Companies must meet certain requirement criteria, which are determined by the publishers of the index, before being added to an index.
- The value of an index is based on mathematical formulas that consider the share prices of all constituents within the index.
- The S&P 500 index is market capitalization weighed, where it gives a higher percentage allocation to companies with the largest market cap.
S&P 500 Inclusion Criteria
The S&P 500 is one of the most widely quoted stock market indexes because it represents the largest publicly traded companies in the U.S. The S&P 500 focuses on the U.S. market’s large-cap sector.
To be added to the S&P 500, a stock must meet a broad set of criteria, including a total market cap of at least $8.2 billion. Additionally, the stock must be issued by a U.S. company, have a positive sum of four consecutive quarters of trailing earnings, and also meet certain liquidity requirements. Companies may be removed from the S&P 500 if they deviate substantially from these standards.
$28.94 trillion
The total combined market cap of the 500 companies in the S&P 500 as of Oct. 5, 2020.
S&P 500 Calculation
The S&P 500 is a free-float market capitalization-weighted index. This means that the more valuable an individual company’s stock becomes, the more it contributes to the S&P 500’s overall return. It is not uncommon for three-quarters of the index’s return to be linked to only 50 to 75 stocks.
Therefore, the addition or subtraction of smaller companies from the index will not have a noticeable impact on the overall return of the index. However, the removal or addition of even just one of the largest stocks can have a major impact.
S&P 500 components are weighted by free-float market capitalization. Larger companies affect the value of the index to a greater degree.
Top 25 Components by Market Cap
As of Oct. 5, 2020, the following are the twenty-five largest S&P 500 index constituents by weight:
- Apple Inc. (AAPL)
- Microsoft Corp (MSFT)
- Amazon.com Inc (AMZN)
- Facebook Inc (FB)
- Alphabet Inc- A shares (GOOGL)
- Alphabet Inc- C shares (GOOG)
- Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B)
- Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)
- Procter & Gamble Company (PG)
- Visa Inc (V)
- NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA)
- Home Depot (HD)
- Mastercard Incorporated (MA)
- JP Morgan Chase & Co (JPM)
- UnitedHealth Group (UNH)
- Verizon Communications (VZ)
- Adobe Inc. (ADBE)
- salesforce.com (CRM)
- Paypal Holdings (PYPL)
- Netflix (NFLX)
- Walt Disney Company (DIS)
- Intel (INTC)
- Comcast Corporation Class A (CMCSA)
- Merck & Co. Inc. (MRK)
- AT&T Inc. (T)
Notably, Google parent Alphabet has two classes of shares—when combined, Google’s weighting in the S&P 500 is effectively 4th behind Amazon.com.
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