It all started in 2013 when Jim Cramer of Cramer's Mad Money fame started talking about FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google) as a group of technology stocks to watch. Google is technically Alphabet so, more recently, he switched to FAAA (Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba and Alphabet) as stocks to watch.
Cramer didn’t include Microsoft because its share price was fundamentally boring. Very few people thought they could get rich by buying it.
Next, Goldman Sachs’ stock analysts came up with their own version: FAAMG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google). In this case, they were grouping technology companies with large market capitalizations. They removed Netflix, which is too small, and added Microsoft, which is one of America’s top five companies by market cap.