Wall Street loves a good acronym.
For years, we had FAANG. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.
Those five companies dominated the stock market, dominated the headlines, and made enormous amounts of money for investors who owned them.
Then Facebook changed its name to Meta. Google became Alphabet. Microsoft and Nvidia became impossible to ignore.
And, suddenly, everybody needed a new acronym.
We got the Magnificent Seven.
That one stuck around for a while.
But apparently seven companies aren’t magnificent enough anymore.
Now we have MANGOS.
Meta. Anthropic. Nvidia. Google. OpenAI. SpaceX.
I’m not making this up.
The point is to identify the six companies supposedly defining the next era of technology, particularly artificial intelligence.
A software engineer named Krishna B. helped popularize the acronym earlier this year, and it’s been making its way around the internet ever since.
I have to admit, MANGOS is a pretty good name.
But what I find most interesting isn’t the name itself.
It’s who’s on the list, who’s missing, and what that tells us about where investors are paying attention.
Two of These Companies Aren’t Even Stocks
Here’s the first thing that jumped out at me.
Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t publicly traded companies.
So right off the bat, a third of this new stock market acronym consists of companies you can’t simply pull up in your brokerage account and buy.
That’s a pretty big difference from FAANG.
FAANG was a collection of stocks. You could build a portfolio of those five companies, track their performance, and compare them with the S&P 500.
MANGOS is something else.
It’s more of a collection of companies that people believe are going to shape the future.
And look at who’s missing.
Apple isn’t there. No Amazon. Microsoft is missing. And Netflix is long gone.
These are some of the most successful businesses in history.
Microsoft and Amazon are spending enormous amounts of money building out artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Apple still has one of the largest installed bases of consumer devices on the planet.
Apparently, none of that is enough to make the new cool-kids list.
That’s what happens when narratives change.
The companies don’t necessarily become worse businesses. Investors just find something new to get excited about.
We’ve seen this movie before.
The Names Change. The Game Doesn’t.
Think about how many different groups of market leaders we’ve had over the years.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, everybody wanted to own the Nifty Fifty.
These were supposed to be the companies you could buy at almost any price and hold forever.
Great businesses. Household names. Companies that were going to keep growing for decades.
Some of them did.
But that didn’t stop investors from losing enormous amounts of money when the prices they paid got too far ahead of reality.
Then came the dot-com era.
Cisco. Intel. Microsoft. Oracle. Sun Microsystems.
Those were the companies building the infrastructure for the internet.
And the internet really did change the world.
The bulls were right about the technology. That didn’t mean they were right about every stock at every price.
Fast-forward a couple of decades, and we had FAANG. Then, we had the Magnificent Seven.
Now, it’s MANGOS.
The common thread isn’t technology.
It’s human behavior.
We love winners. We love stories about the future.
And we especially love putting a catchy name on a group of companies that everybody already knows.
But here’s the part that matters to me.
The stock market doesn’t pay us for knowing which companies are important.
It pays us for owning the right stocks at the right time.
Those are two completely different things.
Show Me the Charts
I don’t have a problem with MANGOS.
I actually think it’s a useful snapshot of where the world’s attention has shifted.
Artificial intelligence is no longer just a feature that technology companies are adding to their products. It’s becoming the foundation for entirely new businesses, industries, and ways of doing things.
And SpaceX brings another dimension to the conversation.
We’re talking about artificial intelligence, computing infrastructure, communications, and access to space.
That’s a pretty interesting collection of businesses.
But if we’re going to talk about these companies as investments, I want to see the charts.
What are the stocks actually doing?
Are they outperforming the S&P 500?
Are they making new highs?
Are investors accumulating shares, or are these companies simply getting the most attention?
And what about all the companies that aren’t on the list?
Because some of the best opportunities I’ve found over the years have come from places nobody was talking about.
Not the companies on magazine covers, and not the stocks everybody already owned.
And certainly not whichever acronym happened to be trending that week.
The market is much bigger than six companies.
I don’t care whether we’re calling them FAANG, the Magnificent Seven, or MANGOS.
If they’re going up, I want to own them.
If they’re going down, I don’t.
And if something else is outperforming all of them, that’s where I’m going to look.
The acronym doesn’t make us any money.
The stocks do.