Megacaps Are Now S&P 500’s Curse as Smart Beta Gets Payback

  • Breadth improves as more U.S. stocks participate in rally
  • Equal-weighted index beats S&P 500 by most in three years
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The world is turning upside-down for U.S. equities, with the biggest gains coming from a strategy that has done little of late but deliver losses to investors and taking over market leadership from large technology stocks.

With companies from Microsoft Corp. to Apple Inc. floundering, baskets of stocks that are free of capitalization biases -- known among traders as smart beta -- are rising twice as fast as their traditional size-weighted counterparts. The S&P 500 Equal Weight Index is up 19 percent since equities bottomed in February, beating the conventional benchmark by the widest margin since 2013.