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The S&P 500 has a concentration problem, and crypto still rides the same plumbing
Ten companies have been carrying the S&P 500 like a heavy tool belt, and the weight shows up in one number: about 41% at the end of 2025.
As of press time, the top ten add up to about 37.3%, and Nvidia alone accounts for about 7.37% of the index.
That little drop matters as a signal worth tracking closely to determine whether it reflects normal operating pressure or a developing structural issue.
Global Markets Investor calls it a bubble, and the word fits the mood, yet the more useful framing comes from the way concentration behaves like a wrapper, it changes how risk travels through the pipes, it changes which valves can flood the room, and it changes what “the market” even means in practice.
Let's start with the simplest receipt, the index math, when the top ten are about 37.3% of the S&P 500, a uniform move in those ten flows straight into the benchmark at roughly 0.373 times the move, even before you argue about what the other 490 names are doing.
That part sits in plain sight, and still gets missed in daily commentary. The index reads like one tape, yet under the hood it behaves like a bundle of cables, with ten thick wires carrying a lot of current.
The deeper warning light comes from the way size gaps have stretched, the Goldman-linked chart below compares the largest stock to the 75th percentile stock, and the ratio sits above 700 times in recent readings, which is the kind of discontinuity engineers circle in red.
Market cap relative to market (Source: GlobalMktObserv)The ten largest companies climbed from about 19% of the index at end-2015 to nearly 41% by end-2025, which is a decade of passive flows, buybacks, and winner-take-most dynamics written into one line.
When that kind of weight builds, the story investors tell themselves becomes part of the structure, “diversified exposure” turns into a promise made by packaging, and packaging starts to behave like leverage, even when the label reads “broad market.”
The interesting part of February 2026 is that the system showed a different pattern, concentration eased from its end-2025 high, and breadth started to show up in the performance split between cap-weighted and equal-weighted versions of the same index.
MarketWatch flagged the equal-weight S&P beating the cap-weighted S&P by the widest margin since 1992, which reads like a quiet vote, money moving from the thick wires into the thinner ones.
That is where the forward-looking question lives, the question is less about whether concentration looks extreme on a chart, and more about how it resolves, through catch-up, through catch-down, or through a longer period where the same handful of firms keep compounding, and the wrapper tightens again.
Three ways this resolves, catch-up, catch-down, re-acceleration
Goldman’s historical work gives a useful map, it looked across roughly a century of concentration episodes, and it found a pattern where markets often rallied in the 12 months after peak concentration, and where “catch-up” breadth tended to show up more often than “catch-down” collapses.
Goldman also kept the caution lights in view, 1973 and 2000 sit in the history as moments when concentration peaks aligned with cycle turns, and when leadership concentration turned from a feature into a fault line.
From here, three scenarios carry most of the usable risk ranges.
- Catch-up broadening. The leaders grind sideways, the rest of the index lifts, concentration eases, and the market stays intact while the internal plumbing improves. Goldman’s framing supports this as a common resolution path, and the early-2026 equal-weight outperformance reads like the first turn of that valve.
- Catch-down unwind. Leadership breaks, and the index feels it through the mechanical weight of the top ten. With the top ten around 37.3%, a 10% drawdown in those names, with the rest flat, maps to roughly 3.7% down for the index, and a 20% drawdown maps to roughly 7.5% down, before second-order effects like risk-parity rebalancing, vol targeting, and sentiment spillovers even enter the room.
- Re-acceleration. Concentration persists because the largest firms keep delivering, and the market keeps paying them for it. Goldman argued that the current era carries lower valuations than the 2000 setup and higher profitability than earlier concentration eras, which supports a path where the same names keep absorbing flows and the wrapper stays tight.
Those scenarios sound abstract, yet they map to decisions readers already live with, retirement allocations anchored to broad market ETFs, corporate treasuries tied to benchmark performance, and crypto portfolios that absorb the same global risk impulse, even when the thesis starts from a different story.
Why Bitcoin keeps feeling like a macro passenger
When equity leadership turns into a single-trade index, crypto traders end up watching the same gauges, liquidity, rates, earnings revisions, and volatility, and the reason sits in correlation regimes, not slogans.
NYDIG put receipts behind the idea, Bitcoin’s rolling three-month correlation with US equities has repeatedly risen into roughly 0.4 to 0.6 during stress, and gold’s correlation stayed around zero over the period it discussed, which frames BTC as a risk asset when markets tense up, and as a freer variable when the room relaxes.
That matters for this concentration cycle: a catch-down unwind in mega-caps offers a realistic path into a broader deleveraging moment, and BTC often rides that wave as higher-beta exposure, which can feel like the same plumbing with different stickers.
It also matters for the more constructive path, catch-up broadening tends to bring a different kind of risk appetite, the kind that supports smaller stocks, international equities, and speculative duration trades at the margin, and BTC can benefit from that shift through flow and sentiment, even while the narrative stays framed around halving cycles and on-chain supply.
Either way, the S&P concentration becomes a macro backdrop for crypto, the kind that changes the shape of drawdowns, and changes the timing of rebounds.
The earnings map offers a quieter explanation for deconcentration
One way concentration eases comes through a boring channel, profits broaden, and investors follow the ledger.
FactSet’s preview for calendar 2026 pointed to roughly 15% S&P 500 earnings growth, and it noted that two Magnificent Seven names sit among the top five contributors to that growth, which implies a path where earnings leadership spreads even if market-cap leadership remains clustered for a while.
That framing pairs well with the early-2026 breadth signals, it turns the concentration conversation from a fear trade into a sequencing trade, first the rest of the index starts carrying more earnings load, then the market starts pricing that load, then the index weight shifts.
FactSet also documented the earlier pattern, Magnificent Seven earnings growth running ahead of the rest of the index in Q3 2025 expectations, which helps explain why concentration stayed sticky into the end of 2025 in the first place.
In other words, concentration often sits atop fundamentals for a long time, and the market treats that as stability, right up to the moment the fundamentals change direction, or rates change the price of duration, or both.
Global context, the US runs an uncapped benchmark, Europe ships a limiter
Concentration also reflects index engineering, and that engineering differs across regions.
EURO STOXX 50 caps individual constituents at 10%, a built-in limiter that reduces the chance one stock becomes a dominant weight, and the rule sits inside the index methodology, like a pressure regulator bolted into the line.
The US benchmark tradition runs with fewer hard caps, and that design choice amplifies the impact of passive flows during winner-led cycles, which helps explain why US concentration became a global macro factor in recent years.
Early 2026 also points to international equities outperforming US stocks, which is important because relative performance changes the flow map, and flows change concentration over time.
BTC trades against the global pool of risk capital, and that pool responds to relative returns across regions, across sectors, and across duration, which means the next equity leadership regime can quietly rewrite the beta profile of everything linked to global risk.
For now, the cleanest way to understand the data is as a system under load, the S&P wrapper tightened for a decade, it reached a late-2025 peak near 41% in the top ten, and it started to loosen into late February 2026 with top-ten weight near 37%.
That loosening can evolve into a healthier distribution of returns, it can snap back into a leader-led regime, or it can turn into a drawdown event that ripples into every asset priced as risk, including Bitcoin.
The chart is the warning label, the forward signal lives in breadth, earnings, and correlation, and those are measurable.
