It’s hard to keep a roaring bull market down. The S&P 500 marked its 66th record close of the year today and the NASDAQ Composite also hit a new peak. The strong performance once again raised the question: what to do with the dominant position mega-cap tech stocks have in most of our stock portfolios. It is a particular challenge for growth fund managers because that’s where the growth and performance has been for the last decade, especially the past few years.

This week’s guest, Margaret Vitrano, and her ClearBridge team saw the high concentration of big tech in their portfolios last year as high risk and a threat to the diversification they see as essential to delivering their historically strong returns with downside protection. They met that challenge by reducing some significant winning positions and actually closing out a big one last year. Understanding why she did it and how she feels about it now can help the rest of us who face similar decisions.

We’ll discuss why they made those sales and where they invested the proceeds as well as how they apply ClearBridge’s longstanding and rigorous ESG standards to their portfolios.

WEALTHTRACK Episode #1821 broadcast on November 19, 2021

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MARGARET VITRANO

Co-Portfolio Manager,
ClearBridge Large Cap Growth Fund

ACTION POINT

REASSESS YOUR EXPOSURE TO THE MEGA CAP TECH STOCKS

Individuals are:

Not hampered by comparisons to any index
Free to own any stock in any size position that you want
After a decade of spectacular outperformance FAANG positions, plus Microsoft are probably sizable