Charles Schwab is one of the largest retail-oriented financial services companies in the US, with $10.1 trillion in client assets across its brokerage, banking, asset-management, custody, financial advisory, and wealth-management businesses at year-end 2024. While best known for its retail brokerage offering, Schwab generates the lion’s share of its revenue and profits through its Charles Schwab Bank and asset-management segments. The firm is a dominant player in registered investment advisor custody, with over 40% market share, and has recently pushed into wealth management with robo-advisory, direct indexing, and other managed-investment solutions.

This pick list highlights constituents of the Morningstar US Large Cap Index that we believe offer investors the best risk-adjusted return prospects. Stocks of large-cap companies where neither growth nor value characteristics predominate. Stocks in the top 70% of the capitalization of the U.S. equity market are defined as large cap.

The United States economy is full of innovation. It has to be. Manufacturing industries that dominated the economy decades ago - textiles, televisions, even automobiles to a large degree - have moved overseas, where labor and materials costs are lower. Yet the U.S. economy, even during the pandemic and the recent period of high inflation, has expanded to record levels. If U.S. corporations weren't innovating, creating new products (such as AI and vaccines) and services (such as Zoom calls and Netflix), as well as moving into new markets (clean energy, rare drugs), the domestic economy would not be growing, and capital would not be flooding into the country. Consider that U.S. GDP was approximately $1 trillion in 1930 but was almost $30 trillion at the end of 2024. That's growth of 30-times. Meanwhile, the U.S. population has grown less than 3-times during that time span, to 340 million from 120 million. The delta between GDP growth and population growth has been driven, in large part, by innovation.

Charles Schwab is a leading provider of financial services, with about 36.5 million active brokerage accounts and $9.9 trillion in client assets. The company offers wealth management, securities brokerage, banking, money management and financial advisory services to individual investors and independent investment advisors.