45% of S&P 500 Stocks Now Move Against the Index — SkimNews
Get the Finance newsletter
Daily finance — markets, central banks, M&A, the prints that move money. Free.
- Goldman Sachs reported about 45% of S&P 500 stocks now have a negative three-month beta, while CNBC's separate analysis found nearly 40% with negative three-month beta and 17% with negative one-year beta.
- Mega-cap technology stocks carry outsized weight in the benchmark, so strong performance from a handful of AI winners can drive the index higher even when most components move the other way, per LPL Financial's Adam Turnquist.
- Evercore ISI flagged 115 S&P 500 stocks with negative beta on a six-month basis, skewed toward energy, utilities, and consumer staples, and called the energy sector a "synthetic S&P 500 put option" given its reaction to geopolitical pressure.
- AllianceBernstein found an unprecedented share of U.S. stocks displaying negative beta in July, as semiconductor, hardware, and AI infrastructure names surged while non-AI companies struggled to keep up.
- SentimenTrader's Jason Goepfert noted a Monday when the S&P rallied 1.5% saw 30 stocks hit 52-week lows while only 7 made new highs — a pattern last seen in December 1999, just before the dot-com peak.
- WisdomTree's Bradley Krom expects the extreme readings to eventually revert to the mean, drawing parallels to the 1999-2000 dot-com era, though Turnquist pushed back, arguing today's tech leaders are mature businesses with established revenue.
Why it matters: With roughly 45% of S&P 500 components running counter to the index, benchmark-tracking investors are effectively making a concentrated bet on a handful of mega-cap tech and AI names rather than diversified equity exposure. The energy sector's emerging role as a hedge against the rest of the market gives active managers a distinct rotation signal that index returns are obscuring.
Ask SkimNews
