Independence Day week is halfway through the year and a good time to see how the markets are faring for the year. A MegaCorp colleague posted this chart showing just how strong the S&P 500 has been year-to-date …
An old boss used to say, “the best way to have a good year is to anniversary a bad one” – and that might be the case now. We’re wrapping the worst year in a long time – still, the 15% growth in 2023 is nice to see.
The chart’s author noted that in every year with at least 10% first-half growth since 1990, the market has finished up for the full year. That’s a bit reassuring to hear, even if “past returns are no guarantee of future returns.”
While the economy still seems quite unsettled, at least the market has taken s steady step forward.
HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!
Image: Pixabay
MrFireStation 
Here is some additional slicing and dicing of the S+P 500 courtesy of Brian Bollinger, CEO of Simply Safe Dividends. For the first half of 2023, the S+P 500 has returned 16.7%. Remember that the S&P 500 is market cap weighted, so a larger percentage of its holdings are in the largest market cap stocks (stocks that have already had a run up in value and often sell at high PE ratios). An equal weighted S&P 500 would have only gone up 5% YTD. He attributes the major part of the S+P 500’s YTD runup to a couple companies that were pumped up due to the hype surrounding AI. He also highlighted that odds highly favor the S&P 500 being up for the year.
The YTD market values for dividend paying stocks hovers between being slightly up to slightly down. Which brings up the question, why would one invest in dividend paying stocks? In 2022, Dividend Payers beat the S&P 500 by double digits.
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Yes – definitely a big bounce back for Big Tech: Apple (up 50%), Microsoft (43%), Alphabet (36%), Amazon (55%), Tesla (113%) and Meta (138%). Also on the AI front, almost everyone is being introduced to Nvidia right now (+190%).
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