Should You Buy the iShares S&P 500 ETF Before 2026, Even With the Stock Market at an All-Time High?

The S&P 500 scale has delivered an mean yearly instrumentality of 10.5% since it was established successful 1957, but it's connected way for a acold amended summation of 18% successful 2025. Although the scale is made up of 500 companies from 11 antithetic economical sectors, a tiny radical of exertion giants are fueling its above-average returns.

The iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (NYSEMKT: IVV) is simply a low-cost exchange-traded money (ETF) that tracks the show of the S&P 500 by owning the aforesaid stocks and maintaining akin weightings. Should investors bargain it heading into 2026, adjacent though the scale is astatine an all-time high? History offers a wide answer.

The S&P 500 is weighted by marketplace capitalization, meaning larger companies correspond a higher percent of its portfolio than smaller companies. That's why, contempt the beingness of 11 sectors, the accusation exertion assemblage has a important weighting of 34.5% connected its own. It's location to 3 of the world's largest companies: Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple, which person a combined worth of $12.2 trillion.

In summation to Nvidia, the accusation exertion assemblage is location to practically each different large semiconductor stock, including Broadcom, Advanced Micro Devices, and Micron Technology. These companies proviso the captious chips and components required to make artificial intelligence, truthful they are astatine the bosom of 1 of the astir invaluable technological revolutions successful history.

But the S&P 500 isn't each astir tech. Below are its adjacent 5 biggest sectors by weighting, on with immoderate of their astir noteworthy constituents:

Data source: State Street. Sector weightings are close arsenic of Dec. 23, 2025, and are taxable to change.

The remaining 5 sectors successful the S&P 500 are user staples, energy, utilities, materials, and existent estate. Simply put, the scale is highly diversified contempt being comparatively top-heavy close present due to the fact that of the tech sector.