Everyone’s talking about the Magnificent Seven. But the real concentration risk runs deeper.
Today, the top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 – names like Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon – make up more than 30% of the index’s value.
These companies now power the global economy in ways that can ground airlines and freeze supply chains, as we saw recently when AWS and Azure stumbled.
Asset managers are in a double bind: they can’t ignore them, and they can’t afford to be over-exposed to them.
We’re in the same boat. New Age Alpha holds these stocks in some of our funds, despite the concentration risk. We don’t hold them because we love them. We hold them because, whether you like it or not, those names shape how nearly every portfolio behaves.
In our NAA Large Core strategy, for instance, we anchor our portfolio with these 10 core stocks. They form the foundation of this strategy, keeping it broadly aligned with the benchmark’s structure.
Through a disciplined, data-driven methodology, we seek to capture alpha opportunities from the remaining 490 stocks in the S&P 500.
This disciplined methodology reveals the h-factor: an innovative risk measure that shows the likelihood that a company will fail to deliver the growth implied by its stock price. The higher the number – on a scale from 0%-100% – the higher the probability that human behavior has inflated the stock price beyond what it can deliver.
To show this in practice, have a look at the performance of our U.S. Large-Cap Core Strategy with and without the top 10 holdings. Since the remaining 90 stocks are selected using h-factor scores, we aim to avoid overpriced risk from the rest of the index and this highlights where we believe real outperformance is generated.


What’s worth remembering here is that the S&P 500 isn’t an equal club of 500 companies. It’s market-cap weighted, which means the bigger a company’s total market value, the more influence it has on the index’s performance.
Achieving alpha, we believe, isn’t about avoiding these giants. It’s about recognizing that their sheer size distorts the rest of the index.
Our process is uncompromising in managing this risk as even a top 10 stock will be excluded if its h-factor score lands in the worst 20%.
The h-factor gives investors a way to see that hidden risk – and to act on it.
How much h-factor risk is hiding in your portfolio?
To see how much, go to avoidthelosers.com to request free access to the h-factor platform.
Mentions of any h-factor scores in this post are only to illustrate the h-factor and current market conditions.
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