Mid-cap stocks are a portfolio plus

Article Excerpt

Medium-sized companies are a bit like the proverbial middle child—they tend not to get as much attention from investors as the smallest or the biggest. But this creates opportunities for investors who are prepared to add the best of those stocks—or the ETFs that hold them—to their portfolios. High-quality mid-cap stocks can offer the stability and balance sheet strength of large caps, while at the same time, they give investors growth potential similar to small caps. What are mid-cap stocks? Mid-cap stocks fall between large-cap stocks and small-cap stocks but the average size of mid-cap companies varies from market to market. Index provider S&P ranks all U.S. listed stocks by market capitalization and then considers the top 500 to be large-cap, the next 400 as mid-cap, and the rest as small-cap. In the U.S., mid-cap stocks currently have an average market capitalization of $7.3 billion. In the smaller Canadian market, mid-cap stocks generally have market values between $1 billion and $8 billion. Some advantages of…