Health is a lucrative business

The largest S&P 500 sector by revenue

Yesterday, we looked at revenue concentration in the S&P 500 by company. But, another way to analyze revenue is by aggregated sectors:

I was pretty surprised by the dispersion of results. For example, real estate is shockingly small and healthcare is even bigger than I expected. These two sectors are also two sides of major affordability issues in the U.S. (aka affordable healthcare and affordable housing).

I always imagined these issues to be somewhat equivalent in terms of intractability but, honestly, if the government wanted to make more homes for people maybe it wouldn’t be that crazy of an infrastructure investment. Healthcare, on the other hand, is a serious beast with a huge amount of vested interest. I suppose healthcare’s massive revenue haul of $2.2 trillion is a big reason it has been a primary political target even after the real-estate driven Financial Crisis in 2008.

More Metrics

Dividing market capitalization by revenue shows that real estate has the largest price-to-sales ratio by far

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