“We’ve entered the second half of this year with a very different market than we would have thought,” Osman Ali, portfolio manager at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, said on a recent call with clients.
The S&P 500 is the broadest index of U.S. stocks, representing the financial performance of 500 leading firms. Among the year’s biggest gainers are data firm Palantir, NRG Energy, data center supplier Super Micro Computer, gold miner Newmont and Uber.
Food and apparel companies, such as Deckers Outdoor, Lululemon, Brown-Forman, Constellation and Campbell’s, battered by tariff fears, rank as the index’s worst performers this year so far. The two other major U.S. indexes — the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which tracks more established firms, and the tech-focused Nasdaq — have also round-tripped to record levels.
The path to the new high watermark has been a turbulent one. Shortly after the S&P 500 hit an all-time high in Febru, investors became alarmed that the leading force propelling stocks higher — namely the massive investments in artificial intelligence that firms had undertaken to boost productivity — was a mirage. That narrative gained momentum when researchers announced the advent of a Chinese AI model, DeepSeek, that appeared to require far less spending for nearly comparable output.
Between Feb. 19 and March 13, the index fell more than 10%.
But it wasn’t until the April 2 Rose Garden speech, in which Trump announced eye-watering “reciprocal” tariff duties on dozens of nations, that the S&P plunged another 10% in a matter of days. In two sessions alone, more than $5 trillion in U.S. market value was wiped out — the largest two-day loss in history. Stacked on top of losses year to date, the index seemed headed for an outright bear market, or a 20% drawdown from its Febru highs.
Finally, on April 9, Trump announced a 90-day pause on the reciprocal duties. The bottom was in, and the stage was set for a dramatic rebound.
Between that date and Thursday — despite significant bouts of volatility — the index has gained nearly 20%.