Technology stocks ought to take a bow. They were the standout performers in the first half of 2023, powering Wall Street — and the Club’s portfolio – higher over the first and second quarters in impressive fashion. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite recorded its best first half of a year since 1983, rising 32.7% through Friday’s session. In the three months ended June 30, the Nasdaq climbed around 13%. The S & P 500 rose 8.3% in the second quarter to extended its 2023 advance to 15.9%. It’s just the 11th time since 1950 that the S & P has recorded a first-half gain of 15% or more. For its part, the Dow Jones Industrial Average posted a positive first-half performance — but lagged significantly behind the S & P 500 and Nasdaq as it maintains relatively less tech exposure. After rising 3.4% in the second quarter, the 30-stock Dow stood higher by 3.8% year to date. Our portfolio largely followed suit. Our tech holdings, led by Nvidia ‘s (NVDA) ferocious rally, were the clear-cut winners. On the other hand, our biggest laggards varied across sectors — from retail to health care. In most cases, their weakness stemmed from a pivotal event, like disappointing earnings. Here’s a closer look at the Club’s best and worst performers in the first half of 2023, starting with the four winningest stocks. The winners NVDA YTD mountain Nvidia’s year-to-date stock performance. Nvidia occupies the top spot, with shares nearly tripling in value as they rose 189.5% in the first half of the year. The semiconductor firm, which is now worth more than $1 trillion, also was the top-performing S & P 500 stock in the first half. Investor optimism around Nvidia’s essential role in enabling artificial intelligence fueled the stock’s impressive gains. On the hardware side, Nvidia makes cutting-edge graphics processers used to train large-language models, like the popular ChatGPT. And its computing platform CUDA and pretrained models on the software side also create the company’s…
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