Got diversification? Access the 20 biggest U.S. stocks

Updated: October 17, 2025

• The U.S. stock market has performed very well overall in the past five years. But nearly 41% of individual stocks are down in the same timeframe, with an average decline of 55.7%.¹
• Diversification is a key tool investors may use to manage the risk of owning the “wrong” stocks in a rising market.
• The iShares Top 20 U.S. Stocks ETF (TOPT) gives investors access to 20 of the biggest companies in the U.S. in a low-cost, tax-efficient wrapper, taking the guesswork out of picking individual stocks.

It's been a good time to own stocks. Major indexes like the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 have produced a string of record closes this year, and a broad measure of U.S. equities has more than doubled in the past five years.² But picking stocks isn’t easy and the harsh reality is nearly 41% of publicly traded companies in the S&P U.S. Total Market Index are down in the past five years, with an average decline of 55.7%.

So equity investors have done great but only if they were in the right stocks. In other words, it’s been very possible to experience meaningful losses in a winning market, which shows the importance of diversification in investing.

And while past performance doesn’t guarantee future returns, shares of the 20 largest publicly traded U.S. companies contributed 59% of the S&P 500’s total return over the last five-years.³ The iShares Top 20 U.S. Stocks ETF (TOPT), which launched on Oct. 24, 2024, empowers investors to access 20 of the biggest and some of the most successful companies in the U.S. with a single trade, via the convenience of the low-cost and tax-efficient ETF wrapper.

The iShares Top 20 U.S. Stocks ETF seeks to track the investment results of an index comprised of the 20 largest U.S. companies by market capitalization within the S&P 500 Index. Market cap is the dollar value of a company’s total outstanding shares of public stock. If, for example, a company has 100 million shares of stock outstanding and it trades at $100 per share, its market cap would be $1 trillion.

Market capitalization is often used as a way to measure the size of a company, and as a way to differentiate between companies. For instance, companies are typically categorized as being large-, mid- or small-cap based on their market capitalization.

Brands currently in the top 20 by market cap include Apple, Amazon, Meta, Johnson & Johnson and JP Morgan Chase. The 20 largest publicly traded U.S. stocks collectively represent $22.6 trillion in market cap, almost equal to the size of the U.S. economy, which produced approximately $29 trillion of GDP in 2024.⁴

These companies operate in more than 160 countries around the world and currently employ about 4.4 million Americans.⁵