Most stocks took a breather on Wednesday, with NYSE decliners leading advancers by 1,100 issues. But the trillion-dollar club continued to add to their huge gains off the early April lows. Three of the top seven gainers in the S&P 500 are in this rare club. On the day, Information Technology, Communication Services, and Consumer Discretionary all rose slightly -- and that helped the Nasdaq pop 0.7% and the Nasdaq 100 tack on 0.6%. The biggest reason that the major indices have rallied so much is the performance of the largest market-cap stocks. By size, and over the past month, MSFT has gained 16%, NVDA has risen 22%, AMZN has tacked on 15%, META is up 24%, TSLA has rocketed 38%, and AVGO has surged 30%. The other largest stocks (GOOGL, AAPL, and BRK.B) have not really participated. The market caps of the big gainers range from $1.1 trillion to $3.4 trillion. Within IT, semiconductors probably have added the most to the recent gains, as the iShares Semiconductor (SOXX) has soared 38% over the 24 days ending May13. That's the largest 24-day run for the chips since early 2000; after rebounding from 9/11; and coming off the October 2002 bear-market bottom. Let's not forget, the SOXX crumbled 41% from its July 2024 all-time high. For more perspective, the SOXX surged 169% from the 2022 low to the 2024 high. The SOXX is now approaching key resistance, including a 61.8% retracement of the bear market and trendline resistance off the 2024 peak. (Mark Arbeter, CMT)

This pick list highlights constituents of the Morningstar US Mid Cap Index that we believe offer investors the best risk-adjusted return prospects. The market capitalization range for U.S. mid-caps typically falls between $1 billion and $8 billion and represents 20% of the total capitalization of the U.S. equity market.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an information technology vendor that provides hardware and software to enterprises. Its primary product lines are compute servers, storage arrays, and networking equipment; it also has a high-performance computing business. HPE's stated goal is to be a complete edge-to-cloud company. Its portfolio enables hybrid clouds and hyperconverged infrastructure. It uses a primarily outsourced manufacturing model and employs 60,000 people worldwide.