The other side of 2023: large stocks that lost hundreds of billions
A rising index and a $207 billion hole in five large stocks can be the same year. That is what concentration looks like from underneath.
The $207 billion
While the Magnificent Seven were adding trillions, the original article on this URL added up about $207 billion of market value lost by the five worst S&P 500 performers of 2023. The index finished the year up. Both sentences are true because the index is weighted by size and the losers were not the entire weight. A rising average with a list of large casualties is the normal shape of a concentrated year, not a paradox.
The specific five will not be the lesson. Rankings of worst performers are dominated by idiosyncratic blows: a patent, a regulator, a demand air-pocket, a pandemic aftershock. The lesson is that buying 'the S&P 500' did not mean every large stock you could name had a good year. Active portfolios that happened to own the losers experienced a different 2023 from the benchmark, and the gap was hundreds of billions at the company level.
How losers lose market value
Market value falls when the price falls or the share count falls. In a bad year it is the price. Drawdown from the prior peak is the clean measure. A stock down 40% has to rise about 67% to get back, which is why a loser list is not a shopping list. The return required to repair the loss is larger than the loss. 52-Week Range is the short version of the same map, updated for the latest year rather than for 2023.
Sometimes the business got cheaper. Sometimes the business got worse and the price was late. Earnings Yield after the fall tells you whether earnings survived. If earnings collapsed with the price, the multiple may be unchanged and the 'cheapness' is an illusion.
Using a loser list without catching a falling knife
Stocks Near Their 52-Week Low is the live cousin of a historical loser article: names pressed toward the bottom of their own year, with price and size attached. Open the ones where the income statement still resembles the business you thought you were researching. Skip the ones where the thesis was the old price. The $207 billion is a reminder that large, index-member, and 'safe' are not synonyms. It is not a model portfolio.
Keep going: academy · best stocks · screener
Questions
Which five companies lost the $207 billion?
The original ranking was the worst S&P 500 performers of 2023 by market-value decline. Membership of that list is a 2023 fact. Rebuilding it from memory as a current shortlist would be a mistake.
If the index was up, do losers not matter?
They do not move a cap-weighted index as much as larger winners. They matter completely to anyone who held them, and they matter to any claim that 'stocks' had one experience that year.