The Financial Post reports in its Saturday edition that RBC is approaching $2.2-trillion of assets, with TD Bank not too far behind at $2.06-trillion. The Post's Barbara Shecter writes, however, that RBC's market cap has soared to $244-billion, putting the valuation gap between the No. 1 and No. 2 banks at more than $100-billion. Though TD and RBC have at times jostled for the top spot over the years, it has usually been a much tighter race. In late 2011, TD briefly pulled ahead of RBC, but both companies' market caps were hovering around $65-billion. RBC has also become "a clear standout" among its Canadian rivals when it comes to the ratio of advisory revenues to lending income, a metric analysts use to determine how effective each bank is at generating higher-margin investment banking revenue in relation to lower-margin corporate lending, according to National Bank Financial analyst Gabriel Dechaine. Nevertheless long-time bank watchers are not ready to declare the Big Five are now the "Big One and a few others." But the divergence in market capitalization is hard to ignore and it dates back to the latter half of the first decade of the 2000s when they began to pursue very different strategies in the United States.