Has the market been de-Fanged? The Fang stocks (an acronym for Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google that now includes other big internet names) have led the market in a remarkable way. Before its reversal, NYSE’s Fang+ index had beaten the S&P 500 by 100 per cent since its 2014 inception.
Two explanations were touted for their success. One was that they had what Warren Buffett would call “wide economic moats” and others might call entrenched monopolistic advantages, and could be relied on to dominate the world for a generation.
The other was that, as with the “Nifty Fifty” stocks of the late 1960s and the dot-coms and TMT stocks of the late 1990s, dominance by a small group of companies was a symptom of a bull market in its final phase.