It's Not the Size

Typically during market pullbacks, the smaller cap stocks get hit harder than the large, blue-chip names.  This hasn't happened during the 3-day pullback we've seen since the close Tuesday.  When breaking up the S&P 500 into deciles (10 groups of 50 stocks) and calculating the average performance of stocks in each decile, the deciles of the biggest stocks have performed about the same as the deciles of the smallest stocks.  At least in this go-around, the sell-off has been of relatively equal magnitude across the board, suggesting that outside motives other than typical market characteristics are contributing to the decline.