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    Stocks: Look to Market Breadth for Direction

    by Ryan Ermey, Associate Editor, Kiplinger's Personal Finance Jun 05, 2020 4 minutes

    Things got gloomy for investors for a while. Between February 19 and March 23, stocks in Standard & Poor's 500-stock index took a Wile E. Coyote-style plunge, losing 33.8% in just a month. Despite uncertainty about the length and severity of the pandemic-related shutdowns that triggered the sell-off, investors, like the coyote himself, once again grew optimistic, pushing the S&P 500 back up 28.4%. (Prices and other data are as of May 15.)

    Lately, the market's behemoths have been doing the heavy lifting. Just five stocks--Alphabet, Amazon.com, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft--account for 22% of the S&P 500 index's market capitalization (share price times shares outstanding), a record level of dominance among a handful of companies. So far in 2020,

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