Did you know. . . .?

This post is one in an irregular series of 'stuff' that I find interesting, if not surprising, that I feel compelled to bore you with. It's part of my preparing you for being able to answer arcane questions that might come your way if you were to be on a game show OR to equip you to make casual cocktail conversation. The penalty for engaging in such conversation is that you'll never be invited again, but you never can pass up an opportunity to entertain or amuse folks with your knowledge of these matters. It is important that you read the entire post.

I spent the good part of the day yesterday working on another "project". First, a description of the project. I wanted to get a feel of the relative market capitalization among the sectors. This information is only for US listed stocks. Why is that important? It's probably not important at all, but being a market voyeur, I thought that it would be interesting to track the change in market capitalization among the major sectors. I recognize that because something is interesting does not make it useful. But here is what I found through looking at the Yahoo sector breakdowns.
The figure above are the relative market caps, in billions, of the nine major sectors. I would have presented this as a pie chart, but due to the enormity of the Financial sector, some of the other sectors were squeezed out. It still seems lopsided, doesn't it? Here's a table that shows the percentage of each sector relative to total market cap.



Let's drill down further. Here's a blow out of the components in the Financial sector.


I didn't put it in a chart format as the enormity of the Foreign Money Center Banks distordted everything else. But of the 104T in market cap for this sector, 92.3% of it is Foreign Money Center Banks. Can this be right? I hope that you are still awake! Let's drill down further. . .

Here is the list of 'Foreign Money Center Banks' and their market cap in billions.



As you can see, Mitsubishi UFJ Group is a whale--not only a whale in this Foreign money center bank, but it's market capitalization comprises 91.4% of all of the financial stocks. I don't know about you, but I find this bit of information startling to say the least. MTU is a behemoth not only in the sector/subsector that it occupies, but also the stock market as a whole. It's market cap is 76.4% of all US listed stocks. It's market cap is 95.402T--T as in trillion.

I'm nothing short of incredulous that one institution could be so overwhelmingly misrepresented. Do you know why? There is a mistake in the way that the data is reported. The results were so skewed, so whack that I went back to ensure that I had not made a mistake. I did not. The Yahoo data for MTU is incorrect. Their market cap is $95.40B NOT 95402.4B. (or 95.402T). The decimal and the T v. B make all of the difference in the world.

I've emailed Capital IQ to alert them to the error.

Didn't I tell you I found a mistake in the Moody's report when researching FGIC?