Most of Wall Street has started to think the “earnings recession” will be over in the last few months of this year. That’s a good thing for the broad market. However, the headline numbers hide a lot of gloom.

Consensus is pointing to 8.2% earnings growth in the fourth quarter, which will truly feel amazing after the last few seasons of backward motion. Unfortunately, more than half of that extra cash will come from just four companies.

You know their names: Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META), Alphabet (GOOG) and NVIDIA (NVDA). They’re the cloud computing giants, some of the biggest Big Tech enterprises in history.

Factor them out and the rest of the S&P 500 . . . the S&P 496, so to speak . . . is on track to give us barely 4% earnings growth in the same season. Divide that extra cash by 496 names and it won’t even feel like a crawl. You’ll need to wait until next year to get something more robust.

And it gets me thinking. I’m not a fan of where the Big Four are trading. All this growth and more is already priced in.

Just look at NVDA. Even with the AI boom, this is still a company that might book $40 billion in sales this year. Mighty Apple (AAPL) runs rings around it with a run rate closer to $400 billion.

Yes, AAPL isn’t growing as fast right now. And it’s a $3 trillion stock on the right day. But with 10X the sales, it’s a lot more able to support 3X the market cap as NVDA.

NVDA is trading at 25X sales. What happened to the fretting about out-of-control revenue multiples last year?

AMZN might book $560 billion in revenue this year. At $1.3 trillion, that’s barely a 2X multiple. Or to say it differently, if AMZN was treated the same as NVDA, it would be a $1500 stock.

That looks absurd, doesn’t it? If you want growth by the end of the year, skip NVDA or at best underweight. Save your money for the stocks that can actually grow into their current multiples and then exceed.

And in that scenario, our Big Four really becomes a Big Three. AMZN, GOOG, META are fine. Start there.

Then skip the rest of the S&P 500. Go smaller. I know plenty of baby AI stocks trading at 10-15X revenue. If they catch up to the NVDA hype, they can double.

That’s growth we can understand and enjoy. But you have to look for them. It’s worth it.