Look at the 10 stocks that carry the greatest weight in the Standard & Poor's 500.

Each is big, famous, and unloved by investors.

While small company stocks, emerging markets stocks, real estate stocks and precious metal stocks have soared at one time or another in the early years of a new century, these global giants have sat around doing nothing.

Partisans of ultra-big stocks have been trumpeting them as bargains for the past two or three years, but with very little effect. The last market-timer who thought he could call the bottom in these blue-chips must have given up long ago.

Far be it from me, a confirmed non-believer in the possibilities of timing, to make any claim that we are at a turning point. But if it's cheapness you're looking for, well, the Big 10 of the S&P 500 paint an eyecatching picture.

The names in this rogue's gallery as of mid-May were, in order of prominence in the index: Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup, Bank of America, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, American International Group, and JPMorgan Chase.

These stocks have produced a simple average total return of 2.3% over the past five years. They have been hard-pressed to beat a money-market fund such as the Vanguard Prime Money Market Fund, which has returned 2% over that stretch.

Using simple averages for the sake of convenience, the Big 10 recently traded at 15 times their most recent 12 months' earnings, against 18% for the S&P 500 as a whole. Their average dividend yield stood at 2.6%, compared with the index's aggregate yield of 1.8%.

Several of the Big 10 have had a bumpy ride in recent years. AIG's chief executive for almost 40 years, Maurice 'Hank' Greenberg, was ousted in 2005 amid a probe of accounting practices. Microsoft shares took a 15% hit in late April and early May after the company said it planned to step up spending to fight competitors such as Google.

Even so, all 10 are prodigious money-making machines with huge and varied operations well placed to benefit from global economic growth.

Collectively, the 10 stocks represent a diversified portfolio of consumer and capital goods and services, ranging over industries that include finance, energy, computers and health care.

A mutual-fund investor can get exposure to stocks of this type in any of a hundred large-cap value or large-cap blend funds.

Simplest of all, anybody who owns an S&P 500 index fund already has a meaningful stake, given that the Big 10 account for 20% of the index as a whole.

Buying shares of a relatively concentrated exchange-traded fund, such as the Ishares Global 100 Index Fund, offers another alternative. Seven of this fund's 10 largest holdings at last report were members of the S&P 500's Big 10.

The Global 100 fund is not one of the hot ETFs right now. Its recent market capitalisation of about $475m is about onesixteenth that of the Streettracks Gold Trust, a commodity-boom favourite that shot up 40% in the last six months.

If you're in the market for neglected bargains, then it's pretty late in the game for gold. With Ishares Global 100, on the other hand, there's no risk of getting caught performancechasing.

There is no way of telling when the Big 10 stocks might come back into favour. There's no guarantee they ever will.

Then again, those very same things were being said five or six years ago about the depressed gold market and despised emerging-markets stocks . . .

and just look at them now.

In no particular time schedule but its own, the investment cycle turns.