An economic downturn almost always favors giants like Microsoft, Apple and Amazon, the country’s three most valuable companies. But the demand for their shares has only been amplified by a crisis that seems almost tailor-made for their future success.
Even as analysts have trimmed expectations for all three companies’ quarterly earnings, which they’ll report this week, their stocks are climbing. Their combined value rose more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars since the recent market low — more than the cumulative gain of the bottom half of all stocks in the S&P 500.
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Besides benefiting from their gargantuan size, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple are all sitting on mountains of cash that will make them largely immune to the funding squeezes other companies are experiencing.
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According to data from Goldman Sachs, the top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 this month accounted for roughly 27 percent of the total value of the index. That surpassed the previous peak, which came during the tech stock frenzy of the late 1990s. The top five companies alone — Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook — account for 20 percent of the index.
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