Performance Recap: US All-Time Highs from October/30/2009

Let's revisit the stocks that made new all-time high prices in the week of October 30 to see how they have performed in about 5 weeks. I took the US stocks over $10 (originally posted here: NYSE and NASDAQ) and compared their closing price on Friday, October 30th to the closing price yesterday, December 7th. The best performers were NEU (NewMarket Corp.), which gained 15.5%, FIRE (Sourcefire Inc.) and AMZN (Amazon.com, Inc.) were not far behind. Here is a chart showing the performance of all 18 stocks during this period (SPY, QQQQ, and GLD are included for comparison).

The distribution favors gainers over losers, which makes makes sense since the indexes had nice gains. On average the all-time highs returned a 5.3% gain, and half returned more than 6.8%. Incidentally, MELA closed at exactly the same price it started at ($10.06) for a 0.0% change. By far the worst performance was EBIX (EBIX, Inc.) at -11.5%. During the same time period both SPY and QQQQ beat the average of the all-time high list with gains of about 7%. We've seen the indexes outperform the average all-time high in each of the recent performance recaps (e.g., here and here). I'm looking forward to seeing if this pattern continues over longer time-frames as I track all-time performance in the months and years ahead.