Sometimes it seems like all anyone can talk about when it comes to the stock market is the Magnificent Seven, those megacap tech firms that have been leading the indexes ever higher over the past several years. Of course, there are hundreds of other stocks in the S&P 500 not named Alphabet, Apple, Amazon.com, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla -- and lately, some of them have been rocking it, too.
In fact, only two of the top 20 performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year -- Nvidia (#2, up 178%) and Meta (#19, up 62%) -- are members of the Mag Seven cohort. Vistra, up some 240%, is the #1 performer. (Others in the top 10 include Palantir Technologies, Constellation Energy, GE Aerospace, and United Airlines.)
It's a pointed reminder that if you cast your lot solely with the Mag Seven, you'll be a leader when they outperform, and you're bound to fall behind when they falter.
The real problem here, says Sylvia Jablonski, CEO and chief investment officer of Defiance ETFs, which has some $2 billion of assets under management, is that Mag Seven stocks are so ubiquitous and have run up so much that investors may not even realize they own these stocks. Or if they do know, they might not realize how much they have.
"Maybe you think you don't hold any of the Mag Seven," she says. "Well, look at your portfolio. Look at every single ETF that you hold. If it has anything to do with tech or semiconductors, you have a lot of exposure to the Mag Seven. If you own any sort of index fund, you probably do too. And furthermore, [the Mag Seven are] probably over indexed in that index."
Jablonski is referring to the S&P 500, for instance, which is weighted by market capitalization, meaning the more a company's value increases, the more it influences the index. Recently, the Mag Seven accounted for nearly 33% of the value of the S&P 500.
To Jablonski and her colleagues at Defiance, this smacks of an opportunity they hope to take advantage of by offering an exchange-traded fund that holds the entire S&P 500 except the Mag Seven. The fund, which includes the 495 other stocks, is weighted by market cap and starts trading under the ticker XMAG (get it?) today.
(Why 495? There are 503 stocks in the S&P 500, but only 500 companies. The total number of stocks includes secondary listings from Fox Corp., News Corp, and Google-parent Alphabet, a member of the Mag Seven.)
Is this just a marketing gimmick or is there really something here? "The idea came from talking to a lot of clients," Jablonski says. "They called us and said, 'You know, I have so much concentration in these stocks across various funds, ETFs, and with the Mag Seven stocks themselves in my portfolio. I'm worried about diversification. How do I get that?' Which got us thinking." She says XMAG is a way to "hedge and put new dollars to work in a way that diversifies your portfolio."
There is already what is essentially a flip-side to Defiance's XMAG. The Mag Seven ETF offered by Roundhill Investments, which trades under the ticker MAGS, "offers equal-weight exposure to the Magnificent Seven stocks."
MAGS has been on a strong run, too. Since its inception last April, MAGS has outperformed the S&P 500, gaining 94% over the broader index's 45% gain. This year, MAGS has climbed 41% versus 24% for the S&P 500.
Remember that since the S&P 500 is market-cap weighted, the index itself is greatly boosted by the Mag Seven, which means a basket of 495 non-Mag Seven stocks would have lagged behind both MAGS and the S&P 500 over those periods.
That would make for some ugly backtesting for XMAG, right? Sylvia agrees: "Backtesting definitely wouldn't be in our favor," she says. "But I think that is kind of the point, right? The last five years have been very much about the Mag Seven. Yes, those names have run up, but now we're starting to talk about diversification."
In fact, the worm may already be turning. Over the past three months, the Mag Seven has become a bit of a drag on the market, climbing only 2% while the S&P 500 is up 5.7%.
XMAG's day in the sun could be starting right now.