Look at it one way, and people are right to fixate on “The Magnificent 7.” Some of the biggest stocks on the market are also the only names keeping the S&P 500 aloft.

They’re the winners in the current economy, with what it takes to stand up to the Fed and stay on course. When the Fed relaxes, they’ll rally as hard as everything else.

And until the Fed relaxes, they’re feeling little material pain. But there’s a twist here. Not all of the biggest stocks in the market are actually part of this group. TSLA has already stumbled.

Nobody on Wall Street seriously believes MSFT or AAPL can get much bigger. They’re doing all right, but in the current quarter their once-meteoric growth rates slow to a relative crawl.

That leaves AMZN, NVDA, GOOG and META to hold up the entire market. Without them, this would be yet another quarter of outright earnings deterioration . . . and even three months from now, the rest of the S&P 500 will remain stalled without their input.

The question isn’t whether these companies have what it takes. The question is whether they’re worth buying at this price. After all, the fact that they’re the best stocks at the top of the market food chain doesn’t necessarily make them great stocks.

Always remember that as an investor, your job isn’t to identify the companies that built the present. They were small in the past and their growth made shareholders a lot of money.

Your job is to identify the companies that are small now that can help build the future. The short answer right now is that if you can find stocks with higher growth than the “Fantastic Four” or similar growth at a cheaper multiple, you’re doing well.

So what are those growth rates and those multiples? AMZN is on track to give us 60% year-over-year earnings growth in the coming quarter . . . good, arguably great. The problem is that the company is still earning close to 30% less than it did in 2021 even at that expansion rate.

And the market is paying 60X forward earnings for the privilege. That might not seem high to you but any higher starts to strain Wall Street limits. AMZN can hold its current price. There just might not be a lot of upside until the company gets a lot of momentum.

I’m not sure that’s happening any time soon. AMZN rules the cloud. AWS is huge. But I wasn’t impressed with what I saw from the company at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. There’s no transcendental third act on the horizon here.

META and GOOG are more humble. META is on track to boost earnings 46% over last year in the coming quarter. Zuckerberg’s austerities have paid off on the bottom line at the price of curtailing the company’s growth engines.

The “metaverse” is stalling. Efforts to boost Instagram and other networks are stalling. This is more or less as good as it gets. And GOOG growth is a lot slower as the “moonshots” fail to hit. Maybe we’ll see 27% growth. That’s not meteoric.

Either way, Wall Street is currently paying about 25X forward earnings for these companies. Then there’s NVDA, the star. Earnings on track to more than double (130%) and commanding a 50X multiple.

I’d rather buy NVDA than AMZN. But I’d rather look to smaller stocks that can keep the growth coming for years and decades to come.

And even if the companies aren’t growing as fast as NVDA or AMZN, the stocks have room to rise. That’s the part that really matters. The road from zero to a trillion was good for these shareholders and then the road from a trillion to two or three trillion was nice as well.

But you’re looking at diminishing returns after that. AAPL at $3 trillion might hit $4 trillion in the foreseeable future. That’s another 30-35% gain. After that, what? And how fast can it get there when even Tim Cook is hard pressed to boost the bottom line more than $0.07 per share?

Getting from $50 billion to $500 billion . . . that’s what it’s all about. AAPL will never do that again. None of the Magnificent 7 or even the Fantastic Four will ever do that again.

Skip the bulge bracket. There’s gold scattered across the S&P 500 and lower in the market food chain if you know where to look . . . and if you’re brave enough to blaze your own trail.