When panning across the US styles screen of our Trend Analyzer tool, one dynamic has become clear over the past week: growth has trumped value. Across the board, most ETFs in this screen are overbought as of yesterday’s close trading a full standard deviation or more above their respective 50-DMAs. However, it is growth oriented ones that have gotten the most extended thanks to outsized year-to-date in addition to 5-day gains.  While those growth ETFs like the Vanguard Growth ETF (VUG) have risen to new highs, value and dividend ETFs have mostly pulled back in the short term.

Taking a sample using the Vanguard family of ETFs, again growth (VUG) is the top performer in the past week and this year while value (VTV) is closer to the bottom of the list.  Meanwhile, the Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF (VIG) has likewise fallen in the past week albeit by a more modest amount. As shown below, the relative strength lines of growth versus value and dividends have tracked one another closely this year.  In both scenarios, growth has outperformed value and dividends throughout most of 2024 with a notable swing higher since early last week.

Impressively, that favoritism towards growth in the past week has been historic. Below we show the rolling 5-day relative strength of growth (VUG) versus dividends (VIG) going back to 2006 when the Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF (VIG) first began trading.  That current short-term stretch of relative strength in growth ranks as one of the most dramatic on record.   The last time there was more than 4 percentage points of outperformance in growth versus dividends was over a year ago in the spring of 2023. Looking back further, there have been multiple other comparable instances since the COVID crash, but there are zero examples before 2020.

For value, that relative weakness versus growth is again at historic levels for a one-week span.  There has been a five percentage point difference between the two over the past week. As with growth versus dividends, that is the widest degree of outperformance since the spring of 2023 with many other occurrences since early 2020.  One difference, however, is that there are also a couple of examples to draw from back during the Financial Crisis years (the first in October 2008 and the second in March 2009).

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It’s been nearly a month now since the Presidential election, and from the close on 11/5 through yesterday (11/3), 354 (71%) stocks in the S&P 500 have experienced gains and the average performance of all 500 stocks in the index has been a gain of 3.89%.  Of the ones that have rallied since the election, 13 have posted gains of at least 20%, and we have listed each one below with one-year price charts below that. Of the 13 biggest winners, most of them were already big winners leading up to the election, and all but four are currently up over 40% YTD. Looking at the charts, it’s also worth noting that the only four that experienced reversals in their trends around the election were EPAM Systems (EPAM), Super Micro Computer (SMCI), Tesla (TSLA), and Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD). In most cases, the reason for these reversals had little to do with the election and were more company-specific events. EPAM and WBD both reported earnings two days after the election, and SMCI had news related to hiring a new auditor. Tesla (TSLA) is the only stock that really saw a notable shift in its trend due to the election, and given CEO Elon Musk’s role as the right-hand man to President-Elect Trump, that move is understandable.

Turning to the losers, only 12 stocks in the S&P 500 were down 10% or more between 11/5 and the close yesterday (12/3). Unlike the list of biggest winners, though, some of these names, especially in the Health Care sector, were in steady uptrends ahead of the election but have seen those rallies reverse. Shares of Leidos (LDOS) were also at 52-week highs just after the election but have plunged since, as Vivek Ramaswamy has discussed the large amounts of bloat in funding for federal contractors. In several cases, though, the declines have been company-specific.

Finally, within the “Trillion-Dollar Club”, most have seen gains but to varying degrees. Leading the way higher, TSLA has rallied nearly 40% (Elon’s bet really paid off!), and next on the list is Apple (AAPL) with a gain of 8.6%. There’s been a lot of talk about Mark Zuckerberg not being welcomed at Mar-a-Lago, but it hasn’t impacted the stock of Meta Platforms (META) as it has rallied 7.2%. Behind META, the other members of the “Trillion-Dollar Club” that have outperformed the S&P 500 are Amazon.com (AMZN), Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/B), and Microsoft (MSFT), which have rallied 7.0%, 5.7%, and 4.8%, respectively. That leaves Alphabet (GOOGL) and Nvidia (NVDA) as the only two members of that club that have underperformed the S&P 500 since the election.

As with anything, it’s tempting to look at these recent performance numbers and extrapolate the out or under-performance throughout the entire Trump Administration, but remember that it hasn’t even been a month yet, so expect a lot of changes along the way.