Stock Market: 2021 Year in Review

Yahoo Finance wraps up all of the highlights and lowlights for the stock market in 2021. Among the biggest winners: Lucid Motors and Moderna! Among the losers: Zoom and Peleton.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Jared Blikre, University of Miami, Jared?

JARED BLIKRE: I went to Florida. I went to Florida International, so go Golden Panthers. However, I guess I would vote for– I would root for University of Michigan, just because they’re the other UM, of course next to the University of Miami.

Let’s go straight to the YFi Interactive. We want to do our year-end recap for 2021. And I got some stats to share here, really interesting.

I’ll go through the majors first. Let’s start with the S&P 500, up 20– almost 27% year to date, by the way, the NASDAQ 100 also up 27% not shown. What we do have is the NASDAQ composite, a little bit less here. That’s about 21% for the year.

Finally, the DOW is a really big laggard here, if you can call almost 19% year to date a laggard– pretty impressive. Russell 2000, not a major index, the minor index came in with total returns of 13 and 1/2%. Now, I just want to point out these were not the best-performing indices around the world.

The CAC 40 up nearly 29% and finally the Tel Aviv market– oh, it doesn’t want to cooperate here. But there we go, up 31%. So that is actually the big winner.

Now, I want to delve into our heat maps here. This is going to be the S&P 500 top winners and losers. So let’s see here. Yeah, we got top winners and losers.

And not surprisingly, Lucid Monor– Lucid Motors, excuse me, up 280% tops the list not only for the S&P 500. And this is a SPAC, so I need to get on the right screen here. There we go. This is looking more like what I was expecting.

Energy names are dominating the S&P 500 biggest winners and losers. We’ve got the top 10 and the bottom 10 right here, Devon Energy up over 178%. We have Marathon Petroleum. That’s up over– or Marathon Oil, that’s up over 146%. That’s the year to date total there.

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And we also have FANG. That is Diamondback Energy. That’s up 123%.

XLE, the S&P 500 energy sector ETF, just had its best year ever, up over 40%. Some other names at the top, we got Ford Motors. Bed Bath & Body Works, that’s up over 132%. NVIDIA, somewhat of a laggard here among the top 10, but really impressive performance of 125%.

But let’s cover those names to the downside because we got a couple of gambling names filling out the bottom three. PENN, that would be Penn National Gaming. That is down nearly 40% and then Las Vegas Sands down 37%, so not the best year for these particular gaming names.

We also have Global Payments. That’s off over 37. Activision Blizzard, that’s down over 28. And the list goes on.

I do want to go to the NASDAQ 100. A little bit of confusion on my part before because the top winner here and not the S&P 500 is Lucid Motors up 280%. That is followed by Moderna up 143%.

But something you’ll notice about a lot of these names, they are well off their highs. These numbers could be substantially higher had we taken them– or had the year closed at their peak. But it didn’t, so we’ll look at the trends here at the top.

A couple of names that are pretty big here– NVIDIA, that became a mega cap stock this year, more than doubling in price up over 125%. Also Applied Materials rounding out some of the top movers here, that is up 82%.

It’s the downside which really catches investors’ attention here. Peloton, knocking off 75%, 76%, of its value this year– pretty tough story right there. China stocks are represented by Pinduoduo. That’s down 67% this year.

And by the way, I don’t even think that’s the worst fare in that particular cohort. And then finally rounding out the dark red here, we got Zoom down 45%. But if we were to go down the list even further– Splunk, DocuSign– the software names really took it on the chin in the final months of the year. At least some of them did, having a rough go of it.

But overall, you take a look at what the trends have been this year. It’s been one of winners and losers, the indices doing very well, the passive investors doing very well. But a lot of investors’ portfolios this year were not tracking the indices. A lot of times the index would be up half a percent, 1%, in people’s portfolios would be down multiple percents.

So it’s been a tricky year. I just want to round out the discussion with the sector action. As promised XLE, the best-performing performing sector of the year, up over 46% followed by real estate, 41%. Then we got tech, financials, and consumer discretionary rounding out the top.

Everything’s in the green. Utilities, staples, those round out the laggards, both up over 14%. If I didn’t say it before, I just want to say XLE, the energy sector for the S&P 500 and the real estate sector for the S&P 500, having their best years ever, Adam.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Let the good times roll, Jared Blikre. Happy new year, and thank you.