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Total value of all UK companies FTSE 100 index The indicator is about 2.06 trillion pounds sterling. However, the index is dominated by 10 big companies, whose combined value amounts to more than half of the total FTSE valuation.
Four Big Hats to the FTSE 100 Index
At the moment, these are the four largest FTSE companies:
| a company | section | Market value | Share the price | 12-month change |
| AstraZeneca | Biopharma | £177.7bn | 11504 p | 25.7% |
| coincidence | oil and gas | £175.5bn | 2,534 p | 30.3% |
| HSBC Holdings | Banking services | £124.3bn | 624.6 p | 14.2% |
| Unilever | consumer goods | £106.5bn | 4,217p | 9.5% |
Each of these FTSE companies are very heavyweights in their field, even the smallest one is worth more than £100 billion. (And only two Footsie companies have valuations over £99 billion.)
I noticed right away that all four stocks have risen in value over the past year. Also, the four beat out the broader FTSE 100 index, which is up 6.9% over the 12-month period. So maybe there is some truth to the old adage about beauty being beautiful?
I do not own any of these super stocks
For the record, my wife and I do not have any of these four individual stocks in our family portfolio. To be honest, this came as a little surprise to me.
Then again, the combined market capitalization of these four companies is £584 billion, or more than a quarter (28.3%) of the total FTSE 100 market capitalization. So, we already have significant exposure to these giants through UK and FTSE 100 index tracking funds. .
Which of the “Whales of London” will I buy today?
As a veteran value investor, I look for bargains by looking at the fundamentals of the underlying stock. Here are the key figures for the four “Whales of London”:
| a company | price-to-earnings ratio | Dividend return | profit return | Dividend cover |
| AstraZeneca | 65.6 | 1.5% | 2.1% | 0.7 |
| coincidence | 5.3 | 18.7% | 3.8% | 5.0 |
| HSBC Holdings | 12.4 | 8.1% | 3.5% | 2.3 |
| Unilever | 15.9 | 6.3% | 3.5% | 1.8 |
The first thing I do is turn down Big Pharma stock AstraZeneca. Based on the fundamentals, these stocks look very expensive to me. Then again, this is a growing company with glowing future prospects. Hence, other investors are happy to pay a premium to own this stock. All the same, this is not mine.
As for the remaining three mega stocks, they all look reasonably cheap to me. In particular, I was going to pick up a bunch of coincidence Participate in the heartbeat, if only you could. After all, they offer a decent covered cash back yield of five times earnings.
However, my wife has embraced the ethical and environmental requirements of investing, so she prefers not to buy shares of oil and gas producers. So I’ll have to part with Shell, even though it seems like a big deal to me.
Transfer to HSBC HoldingsShares in the huge global bank seem undervalued to me. But this group has significant exposure to China and Hong Kong. I am not keen on revealing these two areas at the moment, largely due to the deterioration of relations between the United States and China. So HSBC is out too.
Finally, this leaves the consumer goods giant Unilever, a company I admired for decades for growing sales and steadily increasing cash dividends. At a 52-week low, these shares slumped to 3267.5p in March 2022. I’m happy to catch them at such a low, low price.
Hence, with a well covered dividend yield and a reasonable price rating, Unilever is my choice of these London mega hats!
