With little fanfare last Friday, President Trump’s second term in office reached the 200-day mark. As with anything related to Donald Trump, there wasn’t a dull moment during the first 200 days of the President’s second term, but despite the volatility and massive swings, the S&P 500 and most sectors made it through with gains.

The chart below compares the performance of the S&P 500 and all eleven sectors during the first 200 days of President Trump’s two terms. The S&P 500’s 6.6% gain this time around trailed the 9.0% gain during Trump 1.0 by 2.4 percentage points. At the sector level, eight gained during the first 200 days of Trump 2.0 compared to nine sectors with gains in the first go around. The second chart below shows the performance spread for the S&P 500 and each sector during each period, and for most sectors, the performance disparity has been relatively narrow at less than five percentage points.

The big exceptions were Communication Services, Consumer Discretionary, and Health Care. Communication Services is performing much better this time around than during Trump 1.0, while the latter two sectors are performing much worse. The underperformance of Consumer Discretionary is largely the result of weakness in Tesla (TSLA), which is ironic given that the stock surged immediately after the election on expectations that Musk would be one of the biggest beneficiaries of a Trump Presidency.

In the tables below, we list the 20 best-performing stocks during the first 200 days of President Trump’s two terms. Starting with Trump 2.0, all 20 of the best-performing stocks have rallied at least 40%, but the far leader has been Palantir (PLTR), which is up over 160%. That’s over 90 percentage points more than the next closest stock – Dollar General (DG). Besides PLTR, six more of the top 20 performing stocks are from the Technology sector, which is more than any other sector, and the only ones with multiple stocks are Industrials (4), Consumer Discretionary (3), and Consumer Staples (2).

During Trump 1.0, the top-performing stock in the first 200 days was from the Health Care sector as Align Technology (ALGN) surged 89.3%. Behind ALGN, Arista Networks (ANET), Vertex Pharma (VRTX), and Trade Desk (TTD) were all up over 80%. In terms of sector representation, Consumer Discretionary led the way with four, followed by Communication Services, Financials, Health Care, Industrials, and Technology had three each.

One of the most surprising aspects of the two lists to us was that of all the stocks listed, there was only one that showed up on both lists, and it was Utility! That’s right, NRG Energy (NRG) rallied 50.5% during the first 200 days of Trump 1.0 and 46.0% during Trump 2.0. If you had asked us to guess, NRG wouldn’t have been anywhere near the top of our list!

While major US stock market indices are back to new highs and the bull market continues on, there are some well-known large-cap stocks that have been just plain bad recently.  We screened the large-cap S&P 500 for stocks that have market caps greater than $20 billion that are more than 20% below their 52-week highs as well as down 20%+ over the last year.  Within the S&P, there are 31 stocks that fit this criteria, which we’ve called the large-cap “left behinds” in the table below.

You can probably think of a few of these recent “dogs” off the top of your head.  Some of the once-popular stocks that have been left behind include Trade Desk (TTD), Chipotle (CMG), Target (TGT), Schlumberger (SLB), UnitedHealth (UNH), Lockheed Martin (LMT), UPS, and Adobe (ADBE).  This is a pretty diversified group of large-cap stocks covering communication services (TTD), the consumer (CMG, TGT), energy (SLB), health care (UNH), defense (LMT), transports (UPS), and tech (ADBE), but had you built an equally-weighted basket of these names starting a year ago, you’d be down 32%!

If you’re a chart-watcher and want to hold down your lunch, don’t look at the snapshot below which is another sampling of key names in the “Left Behind” table above.  These down-on-your-luck stocks have been torched recently and most look like they’ll never find a bottom.

Of course, the name of the game is to buy low and sell high, right?  We aren’t sure which ones will make comebacks, but there will likely be a few that you wished you’d bought when revisiting this list of left-behinds a year from now.

This morning’s release of the NFIB’s Small Business Optimism Index saw a return in positivity.  After peaking post-election at 105.1 in December, the headline index went on to fall to a low of 95.8 in April and has since erased about half of that decline. At 100.3 in July, it is back above the historical median and at the highest level since February.

As shown in the table below, breadth throughout the sub-indices of this month’s report was solid, with five inputs to the optimism index rising versus two falling and the remaining two going unchanged month over month.  Categories that were not inputs to that headline number saw weaker breadth. Of those, five of the eight were lower month over month, including a couple of bottom decile declines from categories like higher prices and compensation.

Of the rising categories, two of the most notable were for expectations for the economy to improve and evaluating now as a good time to expand. For the former, the index surged 14 points month over month to 36.  While that is only the highest reading since February and the largest one-month gain since December, the monthly gain ranks in the 95th percentile of all monthly moves on record.  Similarly, the 5-point jump in seeing now as a good time to expand also ranks highly in the 95th percentile of monthly changes for that index.

Those two indices appear to be correlated. In other words, when small businesses see the economy as healthier, they will, in turn, see it as a good time to expand.  This comes up when looking at the given reasons for different expansion outlooks. For both positive and negative outlooks, economic conditions were the leading reason given as each one was at or tied with multi-year highs and lows.  Additionally, as we often note, the NFIB survey has the downside of being politically sensitive. Typically, a Republican administration translates into stronger sentiment and vice versa.  With regards to positive expansion outlooks, the political climate is the second most popular reason, and current levels—even though they are off recent highs—are around some of the most elevated readings since the first half of the first Trump administration.

As for indices that declined, one of the bigger drops was for higher prices. While it may not jump out in looking at the chart of the index, that five-point decline ranks as a 5th percentile monthly move for its history, and current levels remain in the middle of the past couple of years’ range since the peak inflation readings in 2021-2023. The reading that points to more substantial progress is with regard to the percentage of firms reporting inflation as their biggest problem. That reading is down to 11%, unchanged month over month, following a number of steep drops in the past year.

Looking across other most commonly reported problems, an equal share of respondents highlighted poor sales.  That is the highest reading since February 2021, when that reading was declining off of pandemic highs.  While that may sound concerning, we would note it is not far off the average reading (10.5%) observed in the five years from 2014 through 2019.