S&P 500 Return Attribution

Christian J. Galipeau

Christian J. Galipeau
Senior Investment Director, 08/19/20


How have a handful of stocks impacted the year to date return of the S&P 500 index?

Through July 31st, the S&P 500 index is up 2%. What is more interesting is the contribution to the price return. As you can see in the chart below, the lions- share of the returns have come from 5 stocks, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google. Those 5 stocks are up 37% on average while the S&P 500 is up 2%, and the remaining 495 stocks are down 5%.

Similarly, the top 10 performers in the S&P 500 YTD are up 41% on average and comprise 23% of the index weight. The top 10 performers have contributed 846 basis points or 8.46% to the index return while the other 490 stocks have detracted 608 basis points or 6.08%. I have ranked the stocks in descending order by their basis point contribution. See the table below:

Conclusion

There are a handful of stocks doing the heavy lifting and driving YTD returns in the S&P 500 index.

322907