Stocks, sectors that reached record highs in 2023
2023 — and the month of December — has been a year for record gains across various sectors and stocks, such as homebuilders and tech companies.
Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre highlights several stocks and industries that have reached new highs year-to-date.
For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.
Video Transcript
- The Dow closing at a new record high. Now, let's get a check on what stocks are at new highs as 2023 wraps up. Here with the details, Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre. Hi, Jared.
JARED BLIKRE: That's right, Julie. NASDAQ 100 missed that record just by a hair. But it's impressive to see how all of these have stacked up and come to record highs throughout the year. And up first was the tech sector. And what's really interesting is that tech and homebuilders went neck and neck. The mag seven, for all of what we talked about them were met with several homebuilders stocks, and I'll show you that in a second, that were just going up with them into July. Then there was a period of recess, and then they ended up exploding in November, December and that's what we're looking at now.
But we're also seeing chip stocks that stocks at a record high 67% for the year. Covered homebuilders and tech want to talk about infrastructure. We got Pave, that's up 37%, or 30.7%. European financials, the Dow, you look at defense and aerospace, that's the ITA, ETF. Gold, we were just talking about that reaching a record the other day. And also insurance, although this peaked a couple of weeks ago.
So these are all record highs within the month of December. And these are individual stocks. This covers everything in the S&P 500, the NASDAQ 100, and meme stocks. So it's not completely representative of all US stocks, but it's pretty close. What's really interesting, I was talking about the homebuilders. Here, here's builder. This is highly levered to the building sector, and we can see this is a stock that rose through July, had a little bit of a comeback there to the downside, and then really went off to the races starting in November.
That's very similar to this chart of Apple. I'm just going to show you the market cap weighted view here. Very, very similar charts. Apple didn't quite surge as much as some of the others as part of the year end sprint here, but definitely worth writing home about, up almost 50%. Let me go back to the equal weighted and just show you what a broad swath of industries we have seen these record highs take place in.
So PulteGroup, that's number two. That's also in construction. But then we have Pan W, Palo Alto networks, the software company up 111%. Chip stock, AVGO, Broadcom. Then we have FICO, Fair Isaac, that's in the financial sector. And it goes down the line. Booking, here's one, up 76%. This stock pretty impressive, completely different industry than the others we've been talking about. We got Lennar, another home builder up 65%.
What's been interesting too is to see some of these smaller or these less, these smaller return stocks really finally come into their records towards the end of the year. Here's General Dynamics. It's only up 4% for the year, and you can see it spent almost the entire year in the red, but it is finally climbed back here. And if you look at a Mac's chart you can see, this is, they build submarines, but this has been a volatile stock throughout the pandemic. But nevertheless at a record high here.
Here's another one Textron up 14%. AME up 18%. Let's take a look at Ross Stores. This is a retail name. Let's take a look at the year to date. I think this was in the red for much of the year, then we came alive starting just before September, and then really exploded towards the end of the year.
I guess the closing comment here is, you can't really predict what's going to happen at the beginning of the year with a lot of certainty, because I don't think anybody would have expected this towards the beginning. I will say, however, we are still in the midst of the Santa Claus rally. If we do manage these last five trading days of the old year and the first two of the new year, if we manage to close green, that's somewhat predictive of a year end close in 2024. But yeah, don't quote me on that. It's a little bit far away.
- This is why I have a no predictions policy on a personal level.
JARED BLIKRE: I got to get one of those.
- But I'm happy to ask lots of other people for theirs. Thank you, appreciate it.
