Total Crypto Market Cap vs S&P 500's Biggest Companies

With bitcoin working its way into the mainstream and many other cryptos growing as well, I’d like to quickly look at the market cap of all combined cryptocurrencies in comparison to companies in the S&P 500 index, which is made up the US stock market’s biggest 500 companies measured by market capitalization.

Below is the top 5 S&P companies followed by market cap, including the combined market cap of all cryptos. Measured in USD

1. Apple-$892 billion
2. Google-$741.88 billion
3. Microsoft-$670.01 billion
4. Total Cryptocurrencies-$591.94 billion
5. Amazon-$568.15 billion
6. Facebook-$523.57 billion

This gives you a good idea of just how big the crypto space has grown to. To keep it in perspective though, the Forex(currencies) market sees daily trading volume between 3-5 trillion dollars per day, depending on how it is measured. The Forex is both the biggest and most liquid market in the world. Since crytpo’s are obviously classified as a currency and not as a company, the comparison to the biggest stocks in the S&P is not exactly an apples to apples comparison, rather it shows the level of market activity in two different assets.

The basic implications are that all of the money that has been flowing into the crypto space is money that DIDN’T flow into other assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, precious metals, commodities, etc. While the specifics are impossible to truly measure, we can safely deduce that other asset classes must necessarily be squashed of potential gains due to more of the action being in cryptos. This could even be the case for an asset that has been rising anyways regardless of the increasing popularity of cryptos, such as the US stock markets which have been routinely setting all-time highs this year. Those highs could have been even higher if more money had flowed into stocks. Assets like gold and silver could have gone much higher if investors had shown more interest in them rather than cryptos. Of course, it’s impossible to say for certain how billions of human actors would have behaved, and thus affected the price of certain assets.

*This post is not intended as financial advice. It is for informational purposes only.

Sources:
https://coinmarketcap.com/
https://www.reuters.com/article/global-forex-volumes/daily-fx-trade-more-like-3-trillion-than-5-cls-idUSL5N1GK1F5
http://dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap.htm