October was one of the wildest months Wall Street has seen in a while — and the split personality of the market told the story. According to MarketWatch’s month-end review, many Big Tech stocks were hit hard, yet the S&P 500 showed hidden strength beneath the surface, with a majority of stocks posting gains for the month.
The S&P 500 was down about 0.5% for October through Friday morning, even though 75% of the stocks in the large-cap index were up for the month. The distortion comes from concentration: the index is about 40% weighted toward its 10 largest stocks. The Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF was up 5.5% for October — reflecting real underlying strength as investors questioned the massive AI infrastructure build-out.
October’s Biggest Stock Losers: Intel, Alphabet, Meta
Intel was the worst-performing S&P 500 stock in October with a 43.5% decline, MarketWatch reports — at one point flirting with its worst single day since 1974 despite beating profit expectations, as investors balked at AI capex spending. Alphabet fell 18.5% after telling investors it burned through more cash in the summer on AI investments. Meta Platforms dropped 14.7%, Micron Technology fell 16.8%, Nvidia slid 8.7%, Amazon was down 6.9% and Broadcom lost 5.6%.
October’s Biggest Winners: Eli Lilly, Tesla, PTC, Accenture
Among the largest 10 components, Eli Lilly soared 23.5%, Tesla rose 10.5%, Apple gained 4.2% and Microsoft added 1.8%. The month’s top performers included PTC (up 38.7%) and Accenture (up 38.2%). Notably, the equal-weighted index’s 4.1-percentage-point outperformance of the cap-weighted S&P marked the biggest reversal of fortune for the average stock on record, per Dow Jones Market Data.
The takeaway from the data, per MarketWatch: October belonged to the average stock, not the AI giants — a rotation investors will be watching closely into November. (This is reporting on market data, not investment advice.)
Image credits: MarketWatch
Source: MarketWatch — read the full story there.
