The Best Were the Worst Today

Many high fliers took big hits today, even though the Russell 1,000 was only down 0.45%.  We broke the stocks in the index into deciles (each decile has 10% of the stocks in the index) based on their individual performance today.  We then calculated the average performance of the stocks in each decile from the 8/15 market low to the close yesterday.  We found that the stocks that performed the worst today were the ones that have performed the best throughout the recent recovery, while the stocks that performed the best today were the ones that have been performing the worst.  As shown below, the decile of the worst performing stocks today were up an average of 17.2% from the 8/15 low to yesterday's close.  The decile of the best performers today were only up an average of 4.4%.  Today's declines indicate some profit taking in momentum stocks and a little rotation into recent laggards.  This action is typical of market rallies and doesn't indicate a shift in the uptrend.

Below we highlight the worst performing stocks in the Russell 1,000 today.  As shown, Las Vegas Sands (LVS) was down 11.78%, but going into today, it was up 56% from the August bottom.  The only stock down more than 4% today that wasn't up more than at least 18% since 8/15 was Micron (MU), and that was due to an earnings miss.