It was one year ago, Sept. 1, 2020, that mega-cap tech stocks stopped being momentum stocks within the S&P 500, and the laggards in 2020 began to show progress.
The chart above from YCharts shows the performance of the large-cap tech stocks since 9/1/20. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) are notable underperformers in the last 12 months.
As of June 30, 2021, the S&P 500’s YTD total return was 15.25% versus the NASDAQ 100’s 13.24%, while as of Aug. 31, ’21, the S&P 500 returned 21.5% while the QQQ’s have returned 21.39% YTD. (Performance data for downloading isn’t ready until later, so the YTD Aug. 31, ’21 data is from Morningstar.)
Clients are long all of the above, with the biggest weights being Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Amazon.