As I watched one of my Dual Trend Portfolio holdings, Dell Technologies, surge more than 32% on Friday, I couldn’t help but wonder how moves like that stack up against history. Huge one-day gains from stocks like Dell, Micron, and others seem to be happening more often lately. Naturally, that led me to ask whether today’s environment resembles the Dot-Com era.
To investigate, I put together the table below, which highlights all S&P 500 stocks that gained at least 5% in a single day over the past six months, limited to those with at least 10 such occurrences. Unsurprisingly, technology stocks dominate the list.
Let’s dig into a few charts and see what they might tell us.
Micron Technology, a stock benefiting from strong demand for memory, has logged 26 daily gains of 5% or more over the past six months. That’s just one shy of the 27 such advances recorded before the market peak in March 2000. Of course, Micron wasn’t among the era’s most celebrated momentum stocks, so let’s examine a few names that were.
Qualcomm, which surged 3,500% from the LTCM crisis low in 1998 to its January 2000 peak, recorded 27 daily gains of at least 5% during a six-month stretch of that advance.
JDS Uniphase, an optical-networking company, surged 800% from its LTCM-crisis low in 1998 to its peak in December 1999, posting 26 daily gains of at least 5% during a six-month span of that rally.
SDL Inc., a fiber-optic components company that became a market favorite during the late-1990s technology boom, rallied 4,500% from its 1998 low to its March 2000 peak and posted 29 daily gains of at least 5%.
Unfortunately, we do not have access to a more complete historical price series from the Dot-com era, but if we were to make an educated guess, we would expect 5% daily occurrences to have been higher among internet companies due to their limited share float.
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