With under two weeks left to go in the quarter, Q2 2018 is shaping up to be a good one for US equities. Of the 500 stocks in the S&P 500, their average gain so far this quarter is 5.7% with over three-quarters of the index in the black. So much for the weak breadth argument! In terms of top performers, the 34 stocks listed below are all up 20% or more QTD. Leading the way higher is Advanced Micro (AMD), which is up an unbelievable 113%. Trailing way behind in AMD’s dust, the next best-performing stock on the list is Flowserve (FLS) which is still up a respectable 38% followed by Arconic (ARNC), QUALCOMM (QCOM), HCA Healthcare (HCA), and PerkinElmer (PKI), which are all up over 30%.
In terms of the FANG stocks, you have to go down to position number- wait. There are no FANG stocks on the list of top performers! In fact, in order to include even one FANG stock on this list, we would have to extend it to the top 100 stocks (AMZN – 95th). For the list to include two FANG stocks we would have to extend it to the top 300 names (GOOGL – 287th), and finally to include all the FANG stocks, we would simply have to show all the stocks in the S&P 500, as Facebook (FB) is all the way down at position number 490 in terms of its QTD rank. That’s right, only ten other stocks in the S&P 500 have done worse this quarter than Facebook.
