Many of the market’s biggest winners this month are hiding in places investors were not watching a month ago.
Small caps are beating midcaps, midcaps are beating large caps, and the equal-weight S&P 500 (^GSPC) — where each stock gets one vote — is ahead of the cap-weighted version that favors the largest companies.
At the bottom sits the “Magnificent Seven” trade, down double digits and doing what big stocks do when they fall together: dragging the whole tape with it.
This is not what a risk-off month usually looks like. Some of the indexes are having a rough month. The average stock is holding up.
The biggest companies get the biggest pull in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC), and June’s biggest stocks have been the loudest losers. Ten S&P 500 stocks have shed at least $100 billion in market value this month. Only two have added that much.
Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Nvidia (NVDA), Broadcom (AVGO), Tesla (TSLA), Oracle (ORCL), Meta (META), and Palantir (PLTR) are all on the wrong side of that $100 billion line. Micron (MU) and Applied Materials (AMAT) are the only names above it on the winning side.
That pressure had already left the Magnificent Seven down about $2 trillion earlier this month. The latest scoreboard shows how hard it is for the major indexes to rally when their heaviest names are working against them.
June’s leadership handoff
An unlikely set of industry winners and losers has emerged in June.
The unwind in the Iran war premium has helped push WTI crude oil (CL=F) toward its biggest monthly drop since 2020. Energy, both traditional and clean, is under pressure.
Airlines have benefited from lower oil prices. Homebuilders have caught a lift from lower long-term yields. Healthcare, biotech, regional banks, and semiconductors have all found buyers while the old leaders have stalled.
