Large-Cap Stock

A large-cap stock is generally defined as a company with a market capitalization above $10 billion, a threshold that includes most household-name businesses and the bulk of the S&P 500's total value. Large caps tend to be more stable and more heavily analyzed than smaller companies.

The category is a spectrum, not a hard line, and definitions shift slightly by data provider, but the practical distinction that matters for investors is liquidity and analyst coverage: large caps rarely suffer from thin trading, and their public information is picked apart by far more analysts than a small or micro cap ever sees.