A good point but kind of a weak article. It talks about the S&P 500 but that's obviously quite limited. I'd be more interested in a VTI-type (total stock market ETF) comparison. But even that hides the really interesting part about private companies, both big (e.g. Mars candy) and small ("Main St") not being reflected in the stock market. I don't know that we have a good tracker of those, other than some of the periodic BLS surveys?
I think it depends what you mean by "tracker." If you mean a financial instrument that you can get returns out of, probably not (this is by design, and almost certainly a Good Thing). If you mean a thermometer for the "health" of these types of companies, you're probably going to end up looking a lot at employee/consumer sentiment. Most people in the US are employed by these small private companies so in aggregate they are probably the best source for whether or not things are going in the right direction.
Payrolls gives the labour side of the equation, and captures listed / unlisted / self employeed. Tax receipts probably a pretty decent metric as well. All very much secondary data that would indicate the real number (but its how they calculate gdp etc numbers up in the first place).
Also captures government payrolls, which is probably equivalent in activity in the economy to small businesses. (? cant be bothered to look up where it would rank properly)
> 2 Size. While the US economy’s size is over $21T, the stock market (here we use the S&P 500, SPY, as a proxy) is at present worth approximately $40T, so nearly 2x bigger. However, the stock market’s value can fluctuate significantly. In a downturn, the stock market’s value can converge roughly to the size of the overall economy.
This is total an utter garbage - I stopped reading after this; they seem to be confusing different units of $'s.
My house is "worth" 15x my "income" and my "income" is 1/25th of my net worth (and was 200x my net worth when I was 25). There are times these numbers may converge, but it wont tell you which pair of underpants I have on that day.
They could have made a point about prices vs earnings - which gdp / market cap would give some measure of (if you believed that the stock market was a reasonable measure of the market cap of the country) which is almost certainly what the Buffett metric they go on to mention would be motivated by.
