By coinnews 
00:00 Jared Blikre
Wall Street’s brutal first quarter was the worst for the S&P 500 since 2022. Worst March for the Nasdaq 100 since 2001, but it wasn’t all bad. So let’s take a look under the market’s hood. I’m Jared Blikre, host of Stocks and Translation. And today we’re looking at the first quarter, definitely ugly here. And we we can see this in the indices. And then we’re going to do a little bit of a look ahead. But these are the these are all the uh indices that I’m looking at here, starting with the S&P 500 equal weight. And in white, we have the March performance, and in Q1, that is the green performance. And they’re kind of combined. So the March is included in Q1, but I just wanted to show you how everything is negative here. Now, it wasn’t necessarily the start uh at the start of March just a month ago. But we can see the S&P 500 equal weight uh that is doing not too badly. Then we have the Dow, that’s just 30 stocks. And then we get the S&P 500 regular index, that’s down about 5% in the first first quarter. And then we get to the bad stuff. That is the Russell 2000 and the Nasdaq 100 and the Nasdaq composite all down about 7 and a half percent or more. And it’s really interesting because the Russell 2000 is small cap stocks, and those are doing pretty badly along with the Nasdaq 100, which is heavily weighted to some of those mega cap stocks. And you can throw the Nasdaq in there as well. And when you break it down by subject or by sector, you realize it’s not all negative. Uh I have some of the top performing sectors of the year here. And for energy and again, we’re measuring Q1 and also March, you can see energy is the only one that was positive in March and its Q1 performance is about what is that? 8, 9%. Then we also have healthcare, utilities, consumer staples, real estate, and materials. Most of these are defensive. These are some classically defensive sectors. So when you see these outperforming, that is not necessarily a bullish setup, but it is not terribly bearish either because I would remind everybody that when we head into a recession and when we really see that on the wall, uh we see everything getting sold off. And that’s just not what’s happening this year. So these are this is the first half of the sectors, but then I want to show you what changes when we start getting into the second half. Financials still positive for Q1 but definitely negative in March. And then everything is negative in both of these time periods. That is communication services, so that’s Alphabet and Meta. Then we have industrials, you can think Boeing and Caterpillar and some others. And then tech, that is definitely Apple and Nvidia and Microsoft. And then consumer discretionary, by far the worst, down over 10% for the quarter. That is an Amazon and Tesla story. So in framing this around some of the mega caps that we have here, and I have the magnificent seven, again, everything underwater for both March and the first quarter of 2025. But Tesla really stands out here. And to be fair, we’ve realized for a long time now that these are not seven stocks that are marching uh definitely that are marching in order with each other lock step. Uh they each have their individual stories, but there does seem to be this theme of uh the ultra big. Uh those stocks that have done the best over the last few years have definitely gotten thrown under the bus. I want to go into some of the S&P 500 worst performers, and then we’ll do best performers here. These are the worst. I’m going back uh to the beginning of March. And so we have one extra day uh since we’re at the beginning of April here. This goes as to the close. Well, actually, this is real time, so we got a couple days. But just let me sort this by equal weight, and you can see the the broad selling that we’ve seen in some of these industries. A lot of them are cyclical. So you see Super Micro computer, that is a cyclically oriented tech stock. You got Target, you got a bunch of health, you got a couple of healthcare names, you got a bunch of retail names like Tapestry and Lululemon, uh HP, that’s enterprise, that’s down 22%. And leading the way down is United and Delta. And those have just been I’ll show you a chart of United over the last year. You can really see how it’s just fallen off after a really decent rally there. So let’s close with some of the best performing stocks here, and I’ll sort by performance as well. At the very top left is Dollar General. Now, is this recovery in the bull market going to be led by Dollar General? Probably not. So this is a kind of a hodgepodge of what’s working here. But within there, some that we have some pretty strong uh defensive names in healthcare, like United Health and so forth. And even an airline, which was uh love, which is Southwest Airlines, one of the top performers in the S&P 500, kind of at odds with what was happening uh on the worst part. So you put it all in the context, we have a bifurcated market, and we’re looking for the resumption. Those big guys can back uh the trend here. So tune into Stocks and Translation for more market decoding deep dives, new episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays on Yahoo Finance’s website, wherever you find your podcast.