If I’d put £10,000 into the FTSE 100’s biggest stock at the start of 2024, here’s what I’d have now

The value of the FTSE 100 is heavily influenced by its largest members. This made me wonder how closely the largest company in the FTSE tracks the overall value of the index.

Can investors in the biggest stocks still beat the market by picking shares carefully?

It turns out that they can – at least sometimes.

Letting winners run

The biggest company in the FTSE 100 is pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca (LSE: AZN), with a market cap of £174bn.

In second and third place are Shell (£154bn) and HSBC Holdings (£128bn).

This picture has changed significantly over the last five years.

At the start of November 2019, Shell topped the leaderboard with a market cap of £187bn, while HSBC was almost unchanged at £125bn.

AstraZeneca was well down the list with a market cap of £97bn, but the pharmaceutical company’s share price has risen by almost 50% over the last five years….