Performance Recap: US All-Time Highs from the first week of October

I thought it would be interesting to revisit some of the stocks that made new all-time high prices at the beginning of October to see how they have performed in a little over six weeks. So I gathered all the US stocks over $10 (the original posts are here: NYSE, AMEX, and the NASDAQ) and compared their closing price on Friday, October 2nd to the closing price on Monday, November 16th. Here is a chart showing the performance of each stock during this period:

AIXG (Aixtron AG) was the biggest winner, with a 40% gain, and STAR, NFLX, and IOC were not far behind. The gains from price appreciation (not including any dividends) were 10.4% on average, and the median performance was a 6.9%. Nine of the 44 stocks (just over 20%) declined, and the worst performance was PETS, with a 12% loss. For comparison, during the same time period the NASDAQ (.IXIC) was up 6.8%, which is quite similar to the median of the all-time high list. More than half of the stocks from the all-time high list beat the NASDAQ and there were some that did so by a large margin. In other words, there were opportunities to outperform the market by choosing all-time high stocks.

Dr. Wish has pointed out that leveraged ETFs often outperform individual stocks. Over this time period, QLD, a leveraged NASDAQ ETF gained 16.9%, which was more than most of the stocks on the all-time high list, but a smaller gain than 13 of the stocks on the list. Once again, there were opportunities to beat "the market", but the margin was smaller and the probability was lower.

There is one other aspect that I don't have time to get into, but will just mention briefly: MV (Metavante Technologies Inc) was bought out by Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) and has been delisted. I did not have time to figure out the profit or loss from holding MV through the buyout so it is included in the dataset as a zero.