Megacap stocks like Nvidia (NVDA) and Amazon (AMZN) continue to dominate the conversation on Wall Street. Surprisingly, the S&P 500 (^GSPC) is still making gains despite many of the components that make up the index losing. Wall Street investors are now looking toward the second half of the year as the election cycle heats up, and investors still await new information from the Federal Reserve about interest rate cuts.

Yahoo Finance Reporter Jared Blikre joins Asking for A Trend to break down the latest market trends.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Asking for a Trend.

This post was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

Right now.

Stocks closed lower in the final trading day of the week a mi a mi and quarter.

Meanwhile, the A I frenzy leads stocks to a rip roaring first half of the year.

Yahoo finances Jared Blick joins us now with more on the trading day takeaways.

Jared Josh.

This might come as a surprise, but Mega cap still dominating the returns this year.

And I'm gonna switch over to some of our heat maps and just show you the year to date results in sectors up.

Number one is communication services.

Uh, and then you have tech and communicate services.

By the way, let's go over to the NASDAQ 100 because that has all of the big components here that has alphabet and also meta.

So you can see meta up 42% out of those up 30%.

And tech is number two helped, you know, NVIDIA up 100 and 50%.

That helps as well Microsoft.

But these are year to date.

Even if you look at the last month, you still see a lot of green There you take a look at the sectors and, uh, you can see tech communicate uh, it's not communication services.

That's XL C commu.

Uh, discretionary, discretionary and then real estate.

So discretionary has Tesla and Amazon.

Amazon recently reached some new highs there.

So big names, Jared, well known names.

The big sectors under the hood.

I mean other, you know, some vertical, some sub sectors, some indices that let's go to our leaders here.

This is over.

The last month, let me put the year to day totals.

Guess what is in the number one spot that is crypto G BT C up 53%.

Depending on your exact metric.

You're gonna see some pretty big returns in there.

Then we have New York Fang.

That's the mega caps, then socks.

But you were asking about some of those smaller plays.

I like biotech.

Uh, we were looking at that yesterday.

Um, don't like solar right now.

You can see solar, especially not in favour after the, uh, after the debate last night, but also unprofitable tech.

You can see arc down there down 16%.

So what it's been really interesting is the dichotomy between the semiconductors and the software.

So here's semiconductors.

Let me just show you over the last month.

See?

A lot.

Well, see some red there, too.

And then you take a look at software.

Software really came roaring back, so these two are kind of jockeying for position there.

All right.

Next bullet point the Jared Takeaway number two.

All right, we are looking at the S, and P 500 is kind of doing opposite doing the opposite of what its individual components are doing.

Swimming against the tide, Uh, is what I'm calling it.

And this is a bespoke chart.

This goes back to a 1990 each of these bars represents the percentage days of the year, uh, in S and P 500 when it's swimming against the tide of its own components.

That is, if you have more than half of its components 250 that are going up S and P 500 going down.

Well, that counts as one.

And in fact, it happened only today with the S and P 500 closed up, but we had more down issues and up issues.

All of this is relevant, Josh, because it kind of paints a picture where we might be echoing an epic from the past.

Well, I'm going to ask you.

Looks like according to this chart, Jared, the last time we did this right around 1995.

So any, any parallels?

Any conclusions I can draw from that, You know, the 19 nineties.

Really interesting time, period.

Uh, some people compare the current epic to the 1990 nine.com bubble.

But I've seen a lot of evidence that what we are, where we are right now is actually in the mid nineties.

So we haven't even experienced those blow off top euphoria levels.

I showed this chart yesterday.

I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on it, but this is basically S and P 500 correlations.

We are at some low levels.

And guess what happened in the mid nineties?

We were at those low levels for a very long time.

So the bottom line is the current concentration status quo could last longer than people expect.

All right, third and final.

All right, what is in store for Q three and Q four?

We're gonna go see Alley.

We're going it.

Yes, I have another one.

This is a brand new one.

We've been doing this for a couple of weeks now, Uh, we were focusing on July.

Look at that.

That's what I am showing you is the entire year.

So, I, I looked at all the years going back to 1928 when the S and P 500 is up 10% or more by the end of June, like it is this year up 15%.

And you can see, uh, that the rest of the year trails off in July, you still average you see that to fall.

But then the things get a little bit dark.

They get a little bit dreary in there, and then look at November, November.

Guess what happens in November.

That's an election.

Now, this is just This doesn't isn't geared towards election years, the presidential site.

But I think it is notable because I was showing this chart only yesterday.

This is Vic seasonality.

Guess what happens in mid August through October.

That is prime time crash season.

So that's when you see the vic shoot up a lot of years, and so that contributes to what we're seeing right here in this chart.

So all in all, I'm expecting a positive beginning to the, uh beginning to July.

Uh, but then as we get farther into the fall there, who knows?

Jared Blacky.

Thank you, my friend.

You bet.

Great takeaways.