200-Day Check-In

Oct 21, 2025

Yesterday marked the 200th trading day of the year.  With tariff troubles, new policy implementations, geopolitical tensions, there’s already been a ton for markets to contend with in 2025. However, assets have broadly rallied anyways.  In the table below, we show year to date returns through yesterday’s close across a range of ETFs covering a variety of assets both year-to-date through the first 200 trading days in addition to month-to-date for a look at more recent performance.

US equities are up double digits this year with the S&P 500 (SPY) gaining 15.6%, whereas the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) is nearly up 20%.  Small and mid-caps have some variation depending on how you look at them.  The broader look at small caps, the Russell 2,000 (IWM), is only slightly underperforming the likes of SPY year-to-date. Meanwhile, the more selective S&P 600 (IJR), which is constructed only using companies that have reported positive earnings, is up a more modest 5% YTD. The midcap S&P 400 (IJH) is also up in the mid single digits. In other words, it has been the more speculative small caps gaining the most.  Additionally, growth has outperformed value with the same small and mid-cap weakness relative to large caps.

On a sector level, the single best performer should come as no surprise: Tech (XLK) which has risen 24.3% YTD.  The runner up may be more surprising: the historically defensive Utilities sector (XLU), which has gained 22.58%.  The only other sector up over 20% is Communication Services (XLC), and two others, Financials (XLF) and Industrials (XLI), are up double digits. All other sectors have risen mid-to-low single digits with declines more recently MTD.

International stock markets using domestically-traded ETFs have handily outperformed the US this year. In fact, of those shown below, only two have underperformed the US (SPY) YTD, and those are Australia (EWA) and India (INDA).  Finally, we would note that the single largest rallies haven’t come from the equity space this year as gold (GLD) and silver (SLV) are both up 50%+. In fact, GLD’s 13.4% MTD gain is only a couple percentage points less than what the S&P 500 has gained YTD.

We have frequently noted this year’s strength in gold, although the yellow metal and its cohorts are reverting sharply lower today. We discussed that drop in an earlier B.I.G. Tip in addition to the Morning Lineup. With those declines in mind, that has not stolen from what has been a historic rally for gold prices. As shown below, over a 200-trading day span, gold’s over 60% gain is the largest since 2006; one factor of the rally back then was the emergence of gold ETFs like GLD. Prior to that, the only larger 200-day rally of the past half century came during 1979/1980 when there was a surge from catalysts including high inflation, geopolitical instability, and a speculative frenzy in silver.

Here Come the Earnings

Oct 20, 2025

Earnings season is off to the races as the first of the major players in the Financials sector reported last week.  While the calendar is relatively quiet today to start the week, things will quickly ramp up.  Among S&P 1500 companies, tomorrow has 52 stocks reporting with a combined market cap of over $3 trillion.  The following days this week will have the first of the mega-caps with Tesla (TSLA) results Wednesday night.  In addition to the huge market cap from TSLA alone, we’ll get a large number of reports in the middle of this week too with nearly 200 companies in the 48 hours between Wednesday and Thursday.

The back half of next week is when the earnings calendar will ramp back up into the peak of earnings season.  Next Wednesday will have 179 reports, and the following day will have nearly 200.  Included in those are another large share of mega caps: Meta (META), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Microsoft (MSFT)’s combined $9.32 trillion in market cap make reports on Wednesday help contribute to the single most impactful day of earnings. Amazon (AMZN) and Apple (AAPL) report on Thursday too, and after that Berkshire (BRK.B) will be the only other mega-cap report for another couple of weeks when NVIDIA (NVDA) and Walmart (WMT) round out earnings season in mid-November.  Looking to that first week of November, although Berkshire is the only stand out in terms of market cap, the calendar is still very busy with multiple days exceeding over 100 reports from S&P 1500 members.