There are times for investors to be greedy, but now isn’t one of them

financialpost.com:

There are going to be a lot of happy faces when investors open their upcoming quarterly investment statements because global markets have had an excellent start to the year.

If history provides any indication of what lies ahead, there will be even more smiles in April. The month has a positive bias for investors, with the S&P 500 being up 84 per cent of the time over the past 20 years, and the S&P/TSX composite index being up 74 per cent of the time, according to former BNN correspondent Frances Horodelski.

However, today’s market cap concentration in the top 10 per cent of the largest U.S. stocks has only occurred one other time in history and that was in 1929, according to a Deutsche Bank AG analysis. Just four stocks — Nvidia Corp., Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. — have accounted for 47 per cent of the gain in the S&P 500 so far in 2024, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC senior index analyst Howard Silverblatt, as reported by Amber Kanwar on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Wow.

Just four stocks: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon accounted for 47% of the move in the S&P 500 (ie an index of 500 plus stocks) so far in 2024 <a href=«https://twitter.com/hashtag/FabFour?src=hash&ref_src=» https:>#FabFour

<a href=«https://twitter.com/search?q=%24NVDA&src=ctag&ref_src=» https:>$NVDA <a href=«https://twitter.com/search?q=%24MSFT&src=ctag&ref_src=» https:>$MSFT <a href=«https://twitter.com/search?q=%24AMZN&src=ctag&ref_src=» https:>$AMZN <a href=«https://twitter.com/search?q=%24META&src=ctag&ref_src=» https:>$META

via <a href=«https://twitter.com/hsilverb?ref_src=» https:>@hsilverb

Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is appearing a tad overextended, with its relative strength indicator now at its highest level