No, that's not Dalmatians but the number of stocks in the U.S. benchmark S&P 500 index now trading for less than $10 a share.
In fact, $10 would get you 10 shares of online broker E*Trade, now the cheapest stock in the index at 98 cents a share. At the other end of this low-ball spectrum you can get a small slice of the garbage business with a share of Allied Waste at $9.90.
In between lies a raft of household names, many formerly held up as blue chips, including Citigroup ($6.40), Alcoa ($8.16), Xerox ($5.58), Motorola ($3.44), Starbucks ($7.97) and Yahoo ($9.14), not to mention beleaguered automakers Ford Motor ($1.26) and General Motors ($2.79).
And:
"This is definitely unusual," he said. "I think you'd have to go back as far as the 1940s, when $10 was worth more to see a similar number," he said.
Emphasis added by me.
And:
Twenty-five stocks, or five percent of the index, don't make the $1 billion mark in market cap, and just 11 exceed the $100 billion level.
In fact, a third of the entire index is not even qualified to be in the index -- 186 stocks have market caps under $4 billion, the minimum value for consideration for S&P 500 membership.
Emphasis added by me.
Oh no, there's no Depression 2.0. Why, no, not at all. This sort of thing happens all the time.
That's sarcasm, you sleepwalker.
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