Performance Recap: US All-Time Highs from October/16/2009

Let's revisit the stocks that made new all-time high prices in mid-October to see how they have performed in a little over one month. I took the US stocks over $10 (originally posted here: NYSE, AMEX, and the NASDAQ) and compared their closing price on Friday, October 16th to the closing price on Friday, November 20th. Here is a chart showing the performance of all 56 stocks during this period (SPY and QQQQ are included for comparison).

NFLX (Netflix Inc) was the biggest winner, with a 22.4% gain. However, the distribution was skewed towards the red and over this period the average price change (not including dividends) was a 0.9% loss, and the median was a 1.7% loss. Thirty three of the 56 stocks (nearly 60%) declined, and the worst performance was YONG, with a 26.5% loss. For comparison, during the same time period QQQQ was up 1.5%, and SPY was up 0.5%, which both outperformed the average all-time high list. Although there are some nice charts out there, the message from this assessment is that leading stocks trailed the indexes over the past month, which is not a healthy sign for the market as a whole.