Four Hot Trends From the Hottest Exchange

The Amex is the Annika Sorenstam of Wall Street -- an overlooked powerhouse in a smaller league that has broken into the big time in a powerful, splashy but somewhat mysterious way.

You haven't seen any headlines about the American Stock Exchange on any finance magazines, but there's no denying that the companies that list there, in aggregate, have consistently outpaced their rivals on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Stock Market in the past one-, three-, five- and seven-year periods. Take a look at this table below, which compares the Amex composite with the Nasdaq Composite, Dow Jones Industrials, S&P 500 and Russell 2000.

Because most of the companies that list on the American Stock Exchange are small and medium-sized companies, one might guess that the success of its composite is a small-cap phenomenon. (Only 12 Amex stocks weigh in at more than $1 billion in market capitalization.) Yet the Amex has handily beaten the small-cap Russell 2000 index in every period. ...