Fisher Likes Large Caps — Really Large Caps

In an article in London’s Telegraph, Kenneth Fisher offers an interesting take on large-cap stocks.

“I think the time of small-cap dominance is over,” Fisher said. “There will be a switch to large caps — although it won’t be a fast one, more like a dimmer switch.”

Large-cap stocks have underperformed smaller stocks for some time. But Fisher looks at “large cap” in a different context than most people, who view large caps as stocks with market capitalizations greater than $10 billion or so. “If you invested in a big cap, nine years out of 10 they will beat the market. But what you have to remember is what I mean by a ‘big’ stock is really a megacap,” he said. ”For a stock to be considered ‘big’, it must surely be larger than average stock. But the ‘average’ size of a US stock is $75 billion — because the top 20 stocks are so large they skew the average.”

Fisher says there are about 20 megacaps in the U.S., and about half that in the U.K. Since there are so few, he recommends hedging bets by investing in opposing sectors, according to the Telegraph. So while he thinks large tech stocks like Google and Apple will do well in 2011, he has also found that tech and pharmaceutical companies rarely both excel at the same time, so he’ll hedge his bet by holding a pharma stock.