Tech, cruises, Abercrombie: Top 2023 stock performances
Tesla (TSLA), Nvidia (NVDA), and Apple (AAPL) — three of the Magnificent Seven tech stocks — have seen huge gains in 2023, riding the waves of various technology and AI trends. But the tech trade is not the only industry that has benefitted this past year.
Yahoo Finance Live examines several other outperformers across industries, including cruise operators Royal Caribbean Cruises (RCL) and Carnival Corp. (CCL), and even retail chain Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF). Solar energy stocks disappointed in 2023 as significant players saw big annual losses.
For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.
Video Transcript
- Tesla, NVIDIA, and Apple among the best performers in our top trending tickers of the year. All of these names having a lot of excitement on the AI play, also part of the Magnificent Seven when you look at an NVIDIA and an Apple.
Interesting too. I've been seeing some charts comparing Tesla's performance to Bitcoin. And they fall in very similar highs and lows throughout the year. So maybe a similar investing profile there.
But not surprising to see these names doing well in a year where we were looking for some safe haven trades in these big tech names that were powered by the AI boom.
- Yeah, so Tesla and Apple having their best years since 2020. Interesting because as Steve Sosnick mentioned to us a little while ago. Revenue was declining for Apple. And yet the stock still managed to gain. NVIDIA not surprisingly, best year ever in terms of its performance, powering it to a new record.
What I find interesting about these three names as well is that they are all well-known. NVIDIA has become a well-known consumer name, even though it is not a directly consumer facing product obviously. But it goes into a lot of products that consumers use.
So it's interesting, the intersection between them being of most interest to Yahoo Finance users, them being top performers. And hopefully for people, they were long these names. And they ended up having a good year.
- Hopefully, they were happy. I mean, I'm really interested to see how the Tesla double clickers on our platform feel heading into next year. We know that UBS is anticipating that electric vehicle sales were about 47% this year and growth. That's going to go down to 11% growth next year.
That's not necessarily a good leading indicator if you're long on a name like Tesla. But maybe the AI boom, maybe if they can mention that enough times on an earnings call. That'll help them.
- Well, and also Elon Musk has tried to manage expectations around that as well and tried to set the bar kind of low going into next year. Let's also take a look at some of the other stocks that we've been watching closely this year.
Cruise stock sort of a surprise here at the top of the S&P 500 along with these large cap tech stocks. Royal Caribbean, the third best performer in the S&P 500. Carnival coming in at number 6 here.
So it's been very interesting to see these cruise stocks really perform well and finished the year strong, as well as we got the so-called revenge travel boom. And we just recently spoke to Josh Weinstein, who's the CEO at Carnival. And he talked about the visibility that they have into 2024 is remarkable.
The bookings. The strength in bookings that they are seeing at this point in the year he says is basically the best that it has ever been at this point looking out into next year. And so investors really paying attention to that.
Debt is still an issue for some of these cruise line operators. But they're working to address it. That's something also that investors have been happy about.
- It's another one of those surprising names because I keep waiting to see evidence of this shift away from services over to goods. So you see a Royal Caribbean performing well in the stock market, you see a Nike down. I'm not seeing the big shift from service spending to goods spending in that exact comparison dynamic.
So I wonder whether or not that prediction is going to play out is inflation making consumers maybe think, OK, a cruise, you can get a little bit more bang for your buck in that type of travel. Or is revenge travel just here to stay. People got used to traveling a lot. And now they're going to continue.
- We'll see.
- Yeah, we'll see. As always, Julie.
- Well, and to round things off, we've got some surprising performances of the year.
- We do have some surprising performances of the year, Julie. Thanks for that. I do want to talk about Abercrombie & Fitch. Not to really pull away from Brian Sozzi here by talking about this name. I know he loves to talk about it.
But this name is up 300%. If you look at the S&P 1500 index. So a little bit of a stretch there. But outperforming NVIDIA, if you look at their 260% year to date returns, Julie.
So I just found that really interesting. This is one of those names where the CEO Fran Horowitz has been able to really rebrand the company. Having obviously a lot of public relations challenges over the years. Expanding also into things like athleisure, workwear, event wear, and that kind of product diversification has been rewarded by the street and by consumer sales.
- Something I found so fascinating about Abercrombie is it's sort of grown with its customer base. I think of Abercrombie or I thought of Abercrombie as largely a teen brand. But I know many of the 20 and 30 somethings at the office who love it going back to our anecdata, right?
- Yeah.
- So I think that's kind of a fun thing about Abercrombie. The big surprise for me this year, one of the big surprises has been the underperformance of solar stocks, right? The Invesco Solar ETF seeing a decline of about 26% this year.
Tan is the ticker on that. Why has it been surprising? Well, and we've seen some individual stocks do really lousy as well.
Because we had the IRA, right? The Inflation Reduction Act that was supposed to really inject a lot of incentives into this industry. One of the things that has hurt the industry has been California has sort of changed the way it subsidized, rooftop solar panels, that was a setback for the industry.
And we've seen residential solar installations according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance which tracks this industry very closely. Residential solar installations in the US rose an average of 32% per year from 2019 through 2022.
Now they're looking for only 5% annual growth for the rest of the decade. So there's just been a real slowdown there. And we have seen the stocks follow suit. Although, there is some bullishness from the street on solar going into 2024. Again, we'll see.
- Again, we'll see. And again, I feel like that's another one of those baskets that kind of depends on where things go with the Fed because of the way those contracts are financed. So that's going to be, again, another interesting to watch, Julie.
