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Pastimes : The Naked Truth - Big Kahuna a Myth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MythMan who wrote (15245)	1/12/1999 12:49:00 PM
From: accountclosed	Respond to of 86076

sorry if this has been posted elsewhere. i haven't followed as closely today... From smh.com.au Salomon Smith Barney's Jeffrey Warantz and John Manley spent last week totting up the numbers for 1998 and came to the conclusion that there is a "comic book" history of Wall Street and there's the real history. The comic book history, spread to Main Street, USA, by most of the US media, is that 1998 was a champagne year with the S&P 500 gaining 26.7 per cent, the Nasdaq Composite rising 39.6 per cent and the Dow Industrials adding another 16.1 per cent. The real history is that more than 71 per cent of Wall Street share prices lagged the S&P 500 by more than 15 per cent - in short, even though the S&P 500 rose 26.7 per cent, almost three-quarters of the common shares that investors could have had in their portfolios failed to return even 8 per cent. Moreover, 66 per cent of all listed shares in the US equity universe went down in 1998. Some champagne year! The only stocks that rose were the big ones. Shares in companies capitalised at over $US20 billion ($31.5 billion) gained almost 26 per cent on an equally weighted basis. For shares in companies capitalised at $US5 billion to $US20 billion the unweighted gain was just 6.19 per cent ... but everyone else lost. The smallest tier of stocks, capitalised at under $US250 million, fell 24.1 per cent on an equally weighted basis. "Consider that there are over 5,000 stocks in the smallest tier and just over 100 in the largest tier and the reality of the situation sets in," say the Salomon's duo. It sets in even further because their study also reveals just how narrow the breadth of the market's rise was for the mainly large cap S&P 500 Index. The top ten contributors to the index's gain accounted for 43 per cent of that gain and the top 50 contributed 87.5 per cent of the year's gain. "In the end, history will remember 1998 as the year that the big stocks had a really big performance party and everybody else stayed home," say the Salomon analysts.