Can the blue chips deliver?
Remember the ”Nifty Fifty”? That was the group of blue-chip U.S. stocks that no American investor in the late 1960s wanted to be without. The list was packed with household names such as Coca-Cola, Xerox, and Ford. At the center of the postwar economic boom, these companies had a reputation for steady growth. And as more Americans poured into the stock market, they felt comfortable investing in the big names they knew. Now, Europe has a Nifty Fifty of its own. All are huge, well-established companies, such as French retailer Carrefour, Germany’s DaimlerChrysler, and Italian insurer Generali. All belong to the new Dow Jones EuroStoxx 50, a sector-weighted index of the biggest stocks by market capitalization within the European Monetary Union. Since the common currency was launched on Jan. 1, all have outperformed the broader European indexes by nearly 15%, says Mark Howdle, head of equity strategy at Salomon Smith Barney in London. The big question: How long will these stocks be must-
