2021 market trends: S&P soars, bond mayhem, oil rebounds, crypto, dealmaking surges
Yahoo Finance Live's Julie Hyman and Brian Sozzi look back at market trends and standout stock performances seen in 2021.
Video Transcript
- I want to run through the numbers for you on the Yahoo Finance Interactive. If you will join me, we'll take a look here. First, let's start with the major averages and what we have seen here. The Dow up about 19% year to date. The NASDAQ up 22% year today. But it's the S&P 500 that's been the winner here. It's up 27%. As I mentioned, has hit-- has closed at record highs 70 times over the course of the year, which has been pretty remarkable. And it's also been remarkable is that even though this is obviously a pretty large gain for stocks here and it's coming as we have seen now a recovery last year and then this year in stocks.
But if you look at other asset classes, we've seen outperformance elsewhere as well. Before we get to that outperformance, do want to mention what we have seen in bonds. Now, you can kind of ignore the percentage gain here because you don't look at a percentage gain in bonds on the yield basis. What we have seen is about a 60 basis point gain in the 10-year this year. That's the largest one-year yield gain since 2013. So even though we are finishing the year well below many forecast for 2% yield, it's still a pretty big move over the course of the year. So that's something to keep in mind.
US dollar index up about 6.6% year to date. This strength as well has been unexpected by many, so that's something that has been important this year. And what's interesting about that gain is that the gain in the dollar usually comes at the expense of oil and other commodities. That hasn't happened this year. Crude oil futures are up some 60% year to date. So that's been one of the other big winners. And then we got to look at Bitcoin as well. Bitcoin up 63% year to date. So well down off its highs. We know this is a very volatile asset and some of the other cryptocurrencies have performed even better, much better in some cases and some of the smaller coins. But Bitcoin this year has really been characterized by much broader adoption seemingly, including among institutions.
All right. Bear with me here switching on over. Want to take a look at some other themes that we've been watching this year. Here's what's going on yesterday for the sectors within the S&P 500, but we want to switch that on over to year to date. So another interesting thing about this year is even though we talk a lot about how large cap contributed so very much to the gains over the course of the year, it really has been a broad based rally in terms of sectors within the S&P 500. And it's not tech that has led the pack on a percentage basis, it's energy. That has been consistent here along with those oil prices.
So the XLE, that's the one on the upper left here, is a 46%. Real estate at 41%. XLK is the tech sector, 34%. But it's the XLC on the bottom, by the way, that includes communication services, which is things like Meta, it's up 16.7% year to date. And then as well, if you look at the NASDAQ heavy weights year to date, you can see yes, certainly, it is a valid point that large cap tech has contributed disproportionately as it always does to the rally because of how these stocks are weighted. The largest stocks in the NASDAQ 100 to have done remarkably well. Apple, 34%. Microsoft, 53%. Google, 67%. Tesla, 52%. Even Amazon, 3.6%. Because it's so large, it gives a big gain NVIDIA 127% is what we have seen from that stock for the year to date, which is also just an incredible number.
And then finally, this one is for you Mr. Sozzi. Let's take a look at the meme stocks just for fun. You know, we-- these guys have waned in the latter part of the year. But nonetheless, we have still seen some incredible, incredible gains for them. And let's just look at the two tops ones right as we look at the year to date performance. You can see here more than 1,200% for AMC despite coming down quite a bit from its highs stores. And then GameStop still up more than 700%. So that's just touching on all of the many, many things that we've talked about over the course of the year stores. But, hopefully, that hit the the highs for you.
BRIAN SOZZI: It certainly did, Julie. You were leaving it all in the field in the final show of the year. That was your most impressive market tour year to date, very good stuff. I'll just quickly add here. I'm looking at deal activity. The data is starting to roll in from a definitive $5.8 trillion in deals done this year. That is up 64% year over year up, the fastest pace since the mid-nineties deal value up 54% versus 2019 a.k.a. pre-pandemic. And this has been a year of really some impressive deals as companies and sponsors take advantage of these still cheap money environment.
Look, you have Kohl's spending I'm not cold. Cold Kohl's spending $5.7 billion on sports drink brand body armor. You have Amazon buying MGM Studios for about 88.5 billion. And then Oh, yeah. Apollo are now our parent company buying Yahoo, which is us for $5 billion this year. So there's been a lot of headline grabbing and buzzy deals and a lot of IPO bankers that I talked to. They expect another year. It may not be as strong next year as this year just given the fact you may see rates increase, thanks to Federal Reserve. But that first half of next year, you could see a nice upswing in deal activity.
JULIE HYMAN: Yeah. We're going to talk about the IPO pipeline in the second hour of the show today and whether that momentum is indeed set to continue and for how long. But, we already have seen some of that momentum rolling over, right, as we have seen and this is a theme that we started to talk about yesterday that really in the waning part of the year there we have seen all of those sort of hot money, thirsty cash names or whatever you want to call them, from the meme stocks to the new entrants into the market. Whether they be SPACs or IPOs, a lot of that momentum has started to cool even as we've still seen those huge double digit gains from many of the large cap tech names, the growth names, that long awaited value over growth didn't quite materialize.
Like what's interesting here Sozzi to me is everybody kept talking about a value is going to come value is going to come and it has to some extent, right? Financials outperformed on the year, but growth didn't underperform either. So it wasn't really-- it didn't really seem to be an either/or situation in 2021.
BRIAN SOZZI: Well, I think what you've seen really is a melt up in the markets where everyone sees value. Every single stock, for the most part, it looks like a great value. Look at GameStop, you were running through the charts there. AMC, investors coming into the year apparently saw those as great values not so much the past few months but, look you see money just chasing money out there right now.
BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah. It definitely feels that way, and that also means it's been tougher for stock pickers as we've seen some stories perking up here at the end of the--
