This Stock Market Is “Gradually” Rotting Under the Covers
And some of the rot is oozing to the surface.
The sell-off on Tuesday didn’t weigh on the scale of sell-offs: The Dow, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq were down only around 0.5%, give or take a little. But in the broader sense, declines of individual stocks were widespread, and this situation has been going on for months.
On the surface, it still looks hunky-dory. For the 52-week period, the Dow is up 7.5%, the S&P 500 is up 6.7%, and the Nasdaq is up 12.7%.
Yet, even as major indices rose so nicely over the 52-week period, 1,256 individual stocks of those on the New York Stock Exchange dropped to new 52-week lows today, while only 21 reached 52-week highs. How many stocks are listed or traded on the NYSE depends on who you ask. The WSJ data section shows 2,080; others go just over 2,400. If there are 2,080 stocks actively traded on the NYSE, this means 60% hit new 52-week lows today.
And according to my own math, 176 stocks on the NYSE have by now plunged at least 50% from their 52-week highs.
Despite the small drop on Tuesday of the major indices, here is what a random page in alphabetical order of the NYSE listings looks like in terms of red for the day – there is a lot of it, and it doesn’t even include Caterpillar, which dropped 7.6%:
In terms of the S&P 500 – which tracks the largest stocks in their industries, regardless of what exchanges they trade on – a whopping 353 stocks are down at least 10% from their 52-week highs, and 179 of them (that’s over a quarter) have dropped by at least 20%.
Why are the overall indices not down more? Well, Apple is a big reason.
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