This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
Tesla (TSLA) stole the show this week, notching its biggest day in over a decade on Thursday as investors applauded the company’s quarterly results with a flurry of buying.
A 22% increase that day put the stock firmly back in the green for the year, up nearly 7% now after having lagged its “Magnificent Seven” counterparts — and at one point in April being down almost 43% since the new year began.
That means that for the first time since September, all seven Magnificents are back in the green, as our Chart of the Week shows. And if there’s one chart that encompasses 2024’s story for the stock market, this continues to be a good candidate. The more you look at it, the more thoughts jump out.
For example, amid the euphoria of the Tesla comeback story, its 2024 arc still skews tragic — significantly lagging its peers as a distant backmarker despite the week’s gains.
Zooming out further, the differences among Big Tech stocks continue to be stark, keeping questions bubbling up about Tesla’s membership in this informal — but important — cohort amid potential replacement candidates, like former FAANG member Netflix (NFLX), up 63% so far this year.
Perhaps the most important line on this chart is the benchmark — who’s above it and who’s not. As Nvidia’s (NVDA) outsized returns have broken further away from the rest of Big Tech, only two others have even managed to outperform the S&P 500 this year as investors rotate into other sectors.
Nvidia, of course, is responsible for a lot of that. When Nvidia moves, the S&P 500 usually moves too. But between Meta’s (META) line and the S&P’s 23% benchmark are around 150 companies — 30% of the index — that are pulling the index up as they benefit from the market’s broadening and rotation.
Since the future trajectory of stocks, smoothed out, is likely to continue to go up and to the right, a narrative to watch for 2025 is exactly where the S&P 500 line will fall on this chart and which companies can outperform it. As DataTrek’s Nicolas Colas wrote this week, this is where the rubber meets the road for the economy and the Magnificent Seven.
“If one believes that US GDP growth can be +3% in 2025, then the S&P 493 is likely the better bet,” Colas wrote. “Our own view is that growth will be more modest, giving the edge to Big Tech.”
Ethan Wolff-Mann is a Senior Editor at Yahoo Finance, running newsletters. Follow him on X @ewolffmann.