📊 HUGE: A record number of S&P 500 stocks are now moving against the index itself, and it's the most extreme reading since the dot-com bubble.
According to Evercore ISI, the number of S&P 500 members with negative beta, meaning their returns have moved opposite the broader index, has surged to roughly 130, up from 115 just weeks earlier. That's the highest level on record outside the 2000-2001 period following the dot-com crash.
Beta measures how closely a stock tracks the overall market. A negative beta means a stock has actually been rising when the index falls, and vice versa, over the measured period. Goldman Sachs independently found an even broader version of this, putting nearly 45% of S&P 500 stocks at negative three-month beta, while CNBC's own data showed close to 40%.
The list skews heavily toward energy, utilities, financials and consumer staples, defensive and commodity-linked sectors behaving like a hedge against the rest of the market. Evercore has described energy's role in this dynamic as acting like "a synthetic S&P 500 put option."
The deeper story here is concentration. With mega-cap AI names carrying outsized weight, a handful of giants can keep lifting the headline index even as a huge swath of individual stocks struggles beneath the surface. On days the S&P 500 rises, dozens of stocks have still hit fresh 52-week lows, a level of internal divergence not seen since December 1999.
The index number alone is telling you less about the actual market than it has in over two decades.
#StockMarket #SP500 #WallStreet #MarketDivergence #Investing
According to Evercore ISI, the number of S&P 500 members with negative beta, meaning their returns have moved opposite the broader index, has surged to roughly 130, up from 115 just weeks earlier. That's the highest level on record outside the 2000-2001 period following the dot-com crash.
Beta measures how closely a stock tracks the overall market. A negative beta means a stock has actually been rising when the index falls, and vice versa, over the measured period. Goldman Sachs independently found an even broader version of this, putting nearly 45% of S&P 500 stocks at negative three-month beta, while CNBC's own data showed close to 40%.
The list skews heavily toward energy, utilities, financials and consumer staples, defensive and commodity-linked sectors behaving like a hedge against the rest of the market. Evercore has described energy's role in this dynamic as acting like "a synthetic S&P 500 put option."
The deeper story here is concentration. With mega-cap AI names carrying outsized weight, a handful of giants can keep lifting the headline index even as a huge swath of individual stocks struggles beneath the surface. On days the S&P 500 rises, dozens of stocks have still hit fresh 52-week lows, a level of internal divergence not seen since December 1999.
The index number alone is telling you less about the actual market than it has in over two decades.
#StockMarket #SP500 #WallStreet #MarketDivergence #Investing