The Decline of the Top Ten Stocks in 2022
Bryan Taylor, Chief Economist and Michelle Suzanne
It was a sad year for stocks in 2022. As the Fed raised interest rates and war raged in Ukraine, stocks declined and billions of dollars in market cap were lost. The Market Cap of US Stocks was 214% of GDP in 2021; however, it declined to 150% of GDP by the end of 2022 as is shown in Figure 1. The Top 50 stocks declined in value from $24 trillion to $18 trillion, while the Top Ten stocks fell from $13.4 trillion to $8.8 trillion. This article discusses the decline of The Top Ten stocks in the United States which lost a combined value of capitalization of over $5 trillion during 2022.
Figure 1. Market Cap of US Stocks as a Percentage of GDP, 1980 to 2022
Global Financial Data has information on market cap for US companies going back to 1792 when the First Bank of the United States was the largest company in the United States. If you read the blog, “Two Centuries of American Leadership”, you can find out what was the largest company in the United States in each of the past 23 decades. The article, “Four Centuries of Global Leadership” does the same for the entire world.
In Table 1 below, the top ten stocks are ranked according to market capitalization for the years 2021 and 2022 and the last column indicates the percentage change as of December 31, 2022. Each of these have been strong companies over the past years; however, a few of them have experienced huge losses as can be seen in the table.
|
Table 1. Comparison of Companies by Market Capitalization in the United States, December 31, 2021, and December 31, 2022 |
|
|||||||
|
2021 Ranking |
2022 Ranking |
Stock |
Ticker |
Market Cap. 2021 |
Market Cap. 2022 |
Percentage Change |
|
|
|
1 |
1 |
APPLE INC. |
AAPL |
2913.28 |
2066.94 |
-29.05 |
|
|
|
2 |
2 |
MICROSOFT CORPORATION |
MSFT |
2525.08 |
1787.73 |
-29.2 |
|
|
|
3 |
3 |
ALPHABET INC. |
GOOG |
1920.66 |
1148.43 |
-40.21 |
||
|
4 |
4 |
AMAZON.COM, INC. |
AMZN |
1691 |
856.94 |
-49.32 |
||
|
5 |
11 |
TESLA, INC. |
TSLA |
1061.29 |
388.97 |
-63.35 |
||
|
6 |
19 |
Meta Platforms, Inc. |
FB |
935.64 |
319.09 |
-65.9 |
||
|
7 |
13 |
NVIDIA CORPORATION |
NVDA |
735.28 |
359.5 |
-51.11 |
||
|
8 |
5 |
BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC. |
BRK.A |
671 |
686.31 |
2.28 |
||
|
9 |
6 |
UNITEDHEALTH GROUP INCORPORATED |
UNH |
472.94 |
495.37 |
4.74 |
||
|
10 |
10 |
JPMORGAN CHASE & CO. |
JPM |
467.88 |
393.34 |
-15.93 |
||
|
11 |
9 |
VISA INC. |
V |
456.34 |
428.34 |
-6.14 |
||
|
12 |
7 |
JOHNSON & JOHNSON |
JNJ |
450.25 |
461.85 |
2.58 |
||
Apple Dominates Despite Recent Market Declines
The largest company in the United States by market cap has been Apple for the past ten years. As Figure 2 shows, Apple has provided steady returns since 2003. Though its market cap declined from $2.913 trillion in 2022 to $2.066 trillion in 2021, losing 29% of its market cap, Apple remained the largest company in the world. Apple has been the largest company in the world since 2012 when it first reached a $500 billion market cap. Apple was the first company in the world to reach and maintain a $1 trillion market cap in 2019.
Figure 2. Apple Inc. Stock, 1981 to 2023
More Fallen Giants
The next three positions in the ranking of the Top Ten in the United States remained the same: Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon.com, although all three lost hundreds of billions in market cap. The performance of those three stocks is shown in Figure 3. Microsoft had been the largest company in the world in 1998 and 1999, but is now the second largest company in the United States. At the end of 2021, there were five companies with a market cap exceeding $1 trillion, but by the end of 2022, there were only three.