Ryan Sterling

speaker

807 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 7 Sep

Ryan Sterling’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast · Are Index Funds Still Diversified? Concentration Risk and a Top-Heavy Market · 19 Feb 2026 podcast

At the same time, and I think this is potentially

sort of a bigger concern than the concentration in and of itself is that you do see a lot of correlation between these companies at the top.

So for example, if Nvidia is down 50%, that probably means Google's going to be down.

That probably means Microsoft's going to be down.

That probably means Amazon is going to be down.

So it's not just one company being down, you know, 50%.

It's that basket where there's a lot of correlation between them all likely being down at the same time.

So, you know, when I look at the top 10 companies today, as I mentioned, it's Nvidia, it's Apple, it's Microsoft, it's Amazon, Meta, Google, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, Eli Lilly, Broadcom.

When I look 15 years ago, just 15 years ago, a lot of the same companies, but you had ExxonMobil, you had Wells Fargo, you had JP Morgan, you had General Electric.

So you could argue that going back in time, that that top 10 weighting was a bit more diversified than we are today.

So again, that concentration, it's not necessarily just the top 10 making up 40%.

It's also the fact that they seem to be correlated to each other as well.

I would say yes.

And one thing that we're talking to our clients about right now is when we look at the biggest risk facing financial planning and our clients' financial plans, it's the risk of a lost decade.

And that's where you have a 10-year period where the market is negative.

Now, the last time we saw a lost decade was from the late 90s to 2008.

So if you invested in the S&P 500 on January 1st, 1999, and you opened up your statement on December 31st, 2008, you were negative over that 10-year period.

That's very damaging for financial plans where we're counting on having some tailwinds for the market to help propel plans forward.

Okay, so how do you protect against the lost decade?

Well, that's where you further diversify.

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