What are the best (and worst) S&P stocks so far in 2007?

Posted Nov 14th 2007 7:14PM by Beth Gaston Moon
Filed under: Apple Inc (AAPL), Amazon.com (AMZN), Countrywide Financial (CFC)

The temperatures may still be mild in much of the country, but Mother Nature's not fooling the calendar... Thanksgiving is just a week from tomorrow. Then comes the holiday shopping season, and before you know it, we're in 2008.

It's been an interesting year for stocks so far, what with the private-equity bum rush that fizzled, a housing market that just won't snap back, and a little thing called "subprime." But nevertheless, both the Dow and the S&P have managed to hit new record highs. There have been plenty of bullish opportunities if you've been looking in the right places, and of course, there have been some absolute collapses as well.

Ahead of the Ides of November, I turned to the Quantitative Analysis group at Schaeffer's Investment Research, led by the fearless Joe Sunderman, for a list of the best, and worst, performers, year-to-date, in the S&P 500 Index. These rankings were pulled earlier today and do not include any dividend payouts.

The Top Five (since 12/29/2006):

National Oilwell Varco (NYSE: NOV), up 112%
Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), up 102%
Cummins (NYSE: CMI), up 101%
Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), up 100%
Jacobs Engineering (NYSE: JEC), up 99%

The Bottom Five (since 12/29/2006):

E*Trade Financial (NYSE: ETFC), down78%
Countrywide Financial (NYSE: CFC), down 68%
Ambac Financial Group (NYSE: ABK), down 67%
Tyco International (NYSE: TYC), down 67%
Circuit City Stores (NYSE: CC), down 65%

Also of note is that 255 of the SPX components were showing year-to-date gains as of mid-afternoon trading today. This means that (barely) more than half of the index is still in positive territory for 2007.

Beth Gaston Moon is an analyst at Schaeffer's Investment Research.

Tags: AAPL, AMZN, CMI, JEC, NOV