Best Performing Stocks
Friday, October 16, 2009 at 12:56PM As a market-cap weighted index, the biggest companies in the S&P 500 have a bigger impact on performance than the smallest companies. Below we highlight the year-to-date performance of the S&P 500 in both weighted and unweighted forms. The unweighted index gives every stock a 1/500th share of the index, and the year-to-date performance is simply the average of all of the stocks. As shown, the S&P 500 unweighted index is up nearly twice as much as the weighted index (38.95% vs 20.42%) in 2009. This means the biggest companies in the index have significantly underperformed the smaller ones.
In the Russell 3,000, the difference between weighted and unweighted is even bigger. Currently, the Russell 3,000 (weighted) is up 22.39% year to date, while the unweighted index is up 56%! While the headline index is up just over 20%, the average stock in the index is up more than 50%. It's pretty hard to underperform an index when there is such a big divergence in average stock versus overall index performance.
Currently 76% of stocks in the Russell 3,000 are up year to date, and 16% are up more than 100%. Below we highlight all stocks in the index that are up more than 400% year to date! For each stock, we also provide its next expected earnings report date. If you're looking for something to do over the weekend (along with reading through our Week in Review), take some time to go through this list of best performers. Lots of times you'll discover quite a few businesses that you've never heard of but may want to learn more about.
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Reader Comments (4)
Would you mind adding the previous year in both comparaisons to check if the individual stocks really overperformed, or if they they just underperformed a lot in 2008, just to compensate in 2009?
RSP is an ETF that tracks the unweighted S&P 500. Hope that helps.
Thank you!