There’s a lot of chatter today about the major decline in publicly traded firms (h/t Ritholtz Wealth’s Josh Brown). This is not a revelation; industry commentators have been discussing the phenomenon for several years now. I am sure there are several explanations for this: the financial crisis forcing many banks to merge or go under; the tech bubble’s bursting laying waste to many firms that IPO’ed prematurely, etc. However, determining the causes of the change in the capital cycle is not the point of this post. Rather, I am going to show which industries have added and subtracted the most companies over the last few decades just to give some perspective to what has transpired in the public markets.
First of all, I used Professor Ken French’s wonderful data library (specifically the 49 Industry Portfolio data set) to run the numbers. Here are the caveats:
-Because there is an explicable jump in the total number of companies between June and July 1973, I decided to start with July 1973 in an attempt to smooth out possible anomalies.
-You will see that the largest category in the industry column is “other;” this is Professor French’s designation. While I cannot speak for his reasoning for categorizing companies as such, I can only imagine he didn’t think they contributed overall to any of the other 48 industries listed. That being said, I more or less chose to ignore that category.
TODAYS PROFIT SUMMARY: STOCK FUT POWERGRID 2000 AMARAJA BAT 4200 UPL 2000
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