Performance Recap: US All-Time Highs from October/23/2009

Let's revisit the stocks that made new all-time high prices in the week of October 23 to see how they have performed in about 5 weeks. I took the US stocks over $10 (originally posted here: NYSE, AMEX, and the NASDAQ) and compared their closing price on Friday, October 23rd to the closing price yesterday, December 1st. The best performer was MED (Medifast, Inc.), which gained over 22%, and GOLD (Randgold Resources) was not far behind. Here is a chart showing the performance of all 50 stocks during this period (SPY, QQQQ, and GLD are included for comparison).

The distribution is balanced between gainers and losers. On average though, the price change (not including dividends) was a 0.5% gain (excluding ORH because my script couldn't obtain data for it from Yahoo Finance... I see from Google Finance that it traded sideways during the past month so this only minorly affects the analysis). The worst performance was WMS (WMS Industries. They're in the Video Lottery Terminal business.), with a loss just under 20%. For comparison, during the same time period both SPY and QQQQ gained between 2 and 3%, which means the indices outperformed the average all-time high list. As always, keeping your losses small and letting the winners run was the path to success.

With gold trading over $1,200 USD yesterday it comes as no surprise that Both GLD (the gold ETF) and GOLD (a gold mining company) outperformed. As I said in the last performance recap, although there are some nice charts out there, leading stocks trailed the indexes over the 5 weeks: not a healthy sign for the market as a whole. However, some sectors are doing better than others. For best results I like to find the best stocks in the best sectors and industries. Let's take a look at the same list of stocks broken down by sector:

Sectors that did alright:

• Basic Materials traded mostly sideways except for GOLD.
• EW (Edwards Life Sciences) did well in the Healthcare sector.
• Services was a mixed-bag, but there was more upside than downside.

Sectors that did poorly:

• Financials & Technology both traded mostly lower, although there weren't any major losses.
• Half of the Consumer Goods got hit hard.