Ten Stocks Are Now Around 40 Percent of the S&P 500, and Goldman Sees the Tech Bubble in It

The S&P 500 is trading near all-time highs, but almost half of the stocks in it are now moving differently from the index itself. Goldman Sachs says the divergence resembles the Tech Bubble, according to the Venture Capital channel, which published the analysis on Friday evening.

The mechanism is concentration. The ten largest stocks account for roughly 40 percent of the index, and many of them are being carried by the AI build-out. Their weight alone can lift the headline number while participation across the other 490 weakens.

What the other 490 are facing

The rest of the index is not trading against the same conditions. The channel lists four headwinds pressing on companies without an AI revenue story: higher bond yields, oil above 100 dollars, a stronger dollar, and higher borrowing costs. A record on the index does not mean most listed companies are doing well. It means ten of them are.

Why this reaches Addis Abeba

Two of those four headwinds arrive in Ethiopia directly and immediately.

• Oil above 100 dollars is the single largest swing factor in the country's import bill. Ethiopia buys all of its refined fuel, prices it administratively, and absorbs the difference somewhere — in subsidy, in pump prices, or in the reserves.
• A stronger dollar compounds it. Every barrel, every container, every debt-service payment is denominated in the currency that is appreciating against the birr, and the foreign-currency auction has to clear against that.

Higher global borrowing costs matter one step further out, in what any Ethiopian issuer or project finance package pays, and in how patient the development-finance institutions feel.

Open

The Goldman analysis has not been published in full by the channel, which gave no date, note title or link to the original research. The characterisation of the divergence as Tech Bubble-like is the bank's, as relayed, and the specific concentration figure is approximate.

Sources: Venture Capital, 26 September 2026