What is the Nifty Fifty?

The term refers to the 50 popular large-cap stocks on the New York Stock Exchange in the 1960s and 1970s that were widely seen as solid buy-and-hold growth stocks. Most of them are still solid performers, but a few are now defunct or worthless.

Where have you heard about the Nifty Fifty?

If you read the financial comment columns in leading newspapers, you'll probably have come across commentators recalling the Nifty Fifty and using their example to make points about investment strategies.

What you need to know about the Nifty Fifty.

The Nifty Fifty stocks were viewed as ultra-stable, even over long time periods. The companies concerned typically had solid earnings growth, for which the stocks were assigned very high price-earnings ratios, with 50 times earnings being common.

There's no official list of the companies that composed the Nifty Fifty list, but its constituents are generally agreed to include Anheuser-Busch, The Coca-Cola Company, General Electric, IBM and Johnson & Johnson among many other household names. The Nifty Fifty are credited with propelling the bull market of the early 1970s.