Charticle: Shifting Size of Cash Piles

Cash is king, they like to say in investment analysis. So during this slow holiday week, as we all wait for 2025 financial reports to start arriving in mid-January, the crack Calcbench data team decided to kill some time by looking at trends in cash for the S&P 500 versus everyone else.

Conventional wisdom is that large firms are pulling away from all other firms in corporate performance. So what does that mean for cash piles that firms might use for growth or simply to weather any recessionary forces that might come along? Let’s use our Bulk Data Query page to take a look.


Figure 1, below, shows the total aggregate cash and equivalents for the S&P 500 compared to all other filers for the six years of 2019 through 2024. 



As you can see, the “All Others” group had a staggering run-up in cash during the pandemic. Presumably that’s from the trillions in PPP loans that the U.S. government extended to corporations, other loans that firms took out during that era’s period of near-zero interest rates, and robust consumer spending that poured even more cash into corporate coffers. Then came a dramatic wind-down as stimulus spending of the pandemic era faded. 


In contrast, the S&P 500 had much more modest but steady growth in cash, from $1.74 trillion in 2019 to $2.18 trillion in 2021 to $2.2 trillion at the end of 2024. (What will total cash be for the S&P 500 for 2025? Ask us in early March.)


On Average, However… 


When we look at average cash holdings, a very different picture emerges. 


Yes, the average firm (S&P 500 and small filer alike) saw a big bump in cash holdings during the pandemic. From 2022 onward, however, average cash per firm kept rising for the S&P 500, but fell for all other firms. See Figure 2, below.




Those divergent trendlines support the afore-mentioned conventional wisdom that large firms are doing better and better, while smaller firms aren’t. 


Why would that be so? We could speculate on lots of reasons, such as gains from artificial intelligence that larger firms can exploit more quickly, or larger firms being able to withstand tariff pressures more easily, or tax policies, or what have you. 


Those issues are beyond the scope of this post, but Calcbench has tons of data to help you ponder those questions. 

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