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19 February
The S&P 500 is undergoing a historic shift that could reshape the stock market

Market Extra

The Fed’s interest-rate policy in 2026 could disrupt the outperformance of the equal-weighted S&P 500

Four miniature business figures examine a newspaper printout of stock market data with a line graph.
The top story of the 2026 stock market is not about how high the next leg of the bull market goes, but which areas of the market no longer carrying it. Photo: Getty Images/iStock

For the past few years, most of the gains seen by major U.S. equity indexes such as the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq composite were driven by a handful of megacap stocks. But recently, that dynamic has started to change.

As a result, the benchmark S&P 500 SPX, the market-cap-weighted index that’s defined the U.S. stock market for generations of investors, is underperforming its equal-weighted sibling XX:SP500EW by the widest margin at this point in the year since the early 1990s.