FYI: The bear market of 1969 absolutely wrecked small stocks. In just 17 months, they lost 56% of their value, leaving investors once bitten, twice shy. People saw how quickly smaller companies could lose their value, so they turned to a new group of “one decision” stocks. These were blue-chips that had such high growth prospects that no price was too high to pay. This group became colloquially known as “The Nifty Fifty”.
So who were the Nifty Fifty? Turns out there never was an official stamp on this group. There was a list from Morgan Guaranty Trust (that was found in the footnote of a 1977 Forbes article) and a list from Kidder Peabody that showed the 50 Big Board stocks with the highest P/E ratios.
There were 24 stocks that appeared on both lists, which you can see in the table below. The first column shows their P/E ratios in 1972, and their annualized return for the next few decades in the second column.
Regards,
Ted
https://theirrelevantinvestor.com/2018/11/26/the-nifty-fifty/
