S&P 500, short for The Standard and Poor’s 500 is one of the US stock market index widely used to track the performance economy in US.
S&P 500 index had a great year in 2021 with about 26% gain in return. First time in a while S&P 500 index also beat Dow Jones Industrial Average index and NASDAQ composite index. In addition, equal weighted S&P 500 index also performed equal to market cap weighted S&P 500 in 2021.
In this quick post, we have three charts to understand
* the overall performance of all the companies in S&P 500,
* 15 best and worst performers in 2021
* returns of the top 15 companies in S&P 500.
2021 Returns of S&P 500 companies
The distribution of 2021 returns clearly show most of the companies performed well in 2021. Notice most of the companies had positive returns with the median return for the year is about 30%. A few of the companies in S&P 500 had returns as high as ~200%. On the downside some of the the companies had negative return as low about -40%.
Best and Worst performers of S&P 500 in 2021
After looking the distribution of 2021 returns for all the companies S&P 500, a nature question that comes to mind is, what are the companies that performed well and bad. Here is a look the returns of the top 15 companies whose returns were the highest and the bottom 15 companies whose returns were the lowest.
Best performing companies in the top 15 includes Ford motor with 145% gain, Moderna with 127% gain and Bath & Body works with 117% gain in 2021. And among the 15 companies that fared the worst in 2021 include companies like Paypal and Twitter.