The changing shape of U.S. equities
Chart • September 23, 2026
Source: MSCI, data as of June 30, 2026. Telecom Services and Communication Services are shown as a single series to reflect the 2018 GICS reclassification.
U.S. equity exposure today looks fundamentally different from what investors held half a century ago. The market has been reshaped one sector at a time. Energy dominated in the oil-shocked economy of the mid-1970s. Industrials took over through the 1990s, followed by financials ahead of the 2008 global financial crisis. Today, information technology accounts for 37% of the MSCI USA Index, having gained nearly 27 percentage points of index weight since 1974. Over the same period, energy and materials have lost roughly 14 and 8 percentage points, respectively. For investors, the shift shows how dramatically the exposures inside a long-term U.S. equity strategy have changed over time.