Being 5 weeks into calendar 2025, what’s changed in the US and other stock markets this year:
Top 10 SP stocks (market cap weight) – YTD return:
- Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL): -9.10%
- Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA): -3.31%
- Microsoft: (NASDAQ:MSFT): -2.79%
- Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN): +4.45%
- Meta (NASDAQ:META): +22%
- Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL): -2.09%
- Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO): -3.01%
- Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA): -10.45%
- Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRKa) (BRK.B): +4.29%
Chart source: @garysmorrow on X
This is the chart I was looking for last weekend, before the Bespoke chart was used in this post on the sudden emergence of the European stock market. Gary Morrow does great technical analysis work.
While there is a rightward tilt occurring in European politics, the ECB has also reduced it’s funding rate 5 times since 2023. The most recent ECB rate reduction was January ’25.
That green bar area should be a significant source of support for any pullback in the Euro Stoxx 50. Expect President Trump to give us that opportunity via a tariff announcement.
Mike Zaccardi on X posts frequently, and this “S&P 500 earnings revision ratio” from Wisdom Tree is another good update.
The flip sideBeware Rotation: Top S&P 500 Giants Underperform Amid Market Shifts or antidote to this is that the S&P 500 “upside surprise” or beat rate is at +8.1% as of Friday, February 7th, the highest upside surprise since (probably) 2021, although I don’t have data going back that far.
The big tech companies are starting to be a drag on the S&P 500 as I tried to detail in this post last week. Microsoft has a pretty big “earnings weight” in the S&P 500, but I believe Apple’s is the largest earnings weight.
Conclusion:
Equal-weight vs market-cap weight is starting to get more attention, and one compare that I found to be interesting as of Friday, February 7th’s close, was that the Invesco QQQE (equal-weight Nasdaq 100 ETF) was +5.64% YTD in ’25, versus the QQQ’s +2.29% YTD return and the SPY’s +2.51% YTD return.
The RSP (S&P 500 equal-weight) has a YTD return of +2.85%, also greater than the SPY, but not by a material amount.
Is this alarming? Hardly. Does it bear watching – absolutely.
When this blog update was posted in mid-January ’25, it received from snarky comments given it was just 2 weeks into the new calendar year, but rotation begins to happen slowly and then suddenly.
Nvidia hit an all-time-high at $153 in early Jan ’25, and has now backed off. Microsoft’s all-time-high was $468 in early July ’24 and hasn’t traded back there since. If Microsoft trades below the April and August ’24 lows of $385 – $388, it will be the first megacap to break (so to speak).
It’s only an opinion and not a forecast, but how Nvidia reports, and trades and guides when it report fiscal Q4 ’25 earnings on February 26th, 2025, will likely have a big impact on the mega-cap 7 and mega-cap 10 trade of the last few years.
Disclaimer: None of this is advice or a recommendation, but only an opinion. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing can and does involve the loss of principal, even for short periods of time. All earnings data found on this blog is typically sourced from LSEG.
Thanks for reading.