4 S&P 500 Stocks Just Touched 52-Week Lows
A short list of market losers raises a sharp question about the difference between a stock’s price and its business.
The pain on Thursday was spread thin, with no single industry cluster dominating the day’s new lows. As of August 20, just 4 S&P 500 stocks are trading at their 52-week lows, even as the S&P 500 itself has returned +2.0% over the last month. The largest company on the list is CRH (CRH), with a market value of about $62.2 billion.
This small group raises a critical question for any investor: when a stock hits a yearly low, is the business itself also weakening? The full data on today’s names follows.
The Full List, Largest First
- Stocks At 52-Week Lows: Thursday’s Full List
- 13 S&P 500 Stocks Just Made New 52-Week Highs
- S&P 500 Movers | Winners: NDSN, COIN, DE | Losers: MRNA, WMT, ISRG
- The 52-Week-High List: 23 Small Cap Names On Thursday
- 15 Mid Cap Stocks Hit 52-Week Highs On Thursday
- The 52-Week-High List: 8 Large Cap Names On Thursday
Here are all 4 names, sorted by market capitalization, with returns over four windows:
| Tickers | Market Cap |
1D % Chg |
1W % Chg |
1M % Chg |
1Y % Chg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CRH | $62.2 Bil | -1.7% | -4.3% | -6.6% | -15.7% |
| NRG | $23.9 Bil | -4.3% | -3.7% | -17.3% | -21.3% |
| LII | $14.1 Bil | -3.2% | -2.9% | -23.8% | -33.1% |
| TTD | $6.3 Bil | -1.6% | -8.5% | -24.2% | -74.6% |
Which of these businesses are growing despite the stock price?
The steepest one-month slide belongs to Trade Desk (TTD), down 24.2%. Yet its business fundamentals tell a different story. Over the last twelve months, the company’s revenue grew 11.6%, and it currently has a free cash flow yield of 13.6%. NRG Energy (NRG) also shows a similar divergence, with revenue growth of 12.8% over the last twelve months. In contrast, the stock of Lennox International (LII) is at a low while its revenue declined 2.1% over the same twelve-month period.
Is a 52-week low a red flag or a starting point?
A list of stocks at their weakest price of the year is not an automatic buy list. It is a list of businesses whose market perception has soured. A low can mark real damage to a company’s operations, or it can mark a healthy business that has simply been sold off. The disciplined move is to treat the list as a prompt for research, checking the business fundamentals before ever looking at the price chart.
A 52-week-low list tells you where the pain is; it does not tell you which of these declines are worth buying. That second question is what our Buy the Dip screen answers, every day: beaten-down names where the fundamentals still hold up.
The Low List Is A Symptom. Own The Discipline Instead
Every stock on this list got here the same way: the market lost confidence faster than the business could defend itself. Some will earn that confidence back and some will not, and telling them apart name by name is unforgiving work.
That work is what the Trefis High Quality (HQ) Portfolio systematizes: about 30 quality businesses screened for the cash flow and balance-sheet strength that let a company fight through a bad year, sized and rebalanced by rules. It has a track record of outpacing a benchmark that combines the three major indices – the S&P 500, S&P Mid-cap, and Russell 2000. Read the list; own the discipline.