The 52-Week-Low List: 28 S&P 500 Names On Wednesday
A list of market laggards includes some of the market’s largest and most familiar names.
The Multi-Utilities industry placed 5 names on today’s list of stocks at their weakest prices of the year. As of Wednesday, September 23, there are 28 S&P 500 stocks trading at their 52-week lows. The largest company among them is McDonald’s (MCD), with a market value of about $169.0 billion.
The presence of such a large, established company raises a critical question for any investor scanning these names: does a new low reflect a newly damaged business, or simply a newly discounted one?
Every Name On The List
Here are all 28 names, sorted by market capitalization, with returns over four windows:
| Tickers | Market Cap |
1D % Chg |
1W % Chg |
1M % Chg |
1Y % Chg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MCD | $169.0 Bil | -4.8% | -4.1% | -11.9% | -19.3% |
| RCL | $61.7 Bil | -2.0% | -8.8% | -20.9% | -28.4% |
| AON | $60.0 Bil | -1.6% | -6.3% | -21.6% | -19.6% |
| CRH | $56.9 Bil | -3.2% | -1.7% | -11.0% | -24.6% |
| SRE | $51.2 Bil | -3.3% | -4.1% | -7.4% | -2.1% |
| LHX | $44.5 Bil | -0.3% | -4.6% | -8.6% | -14.5% |
| EXC | $41.7 Bil | -2.7% | -4.1% | -7.4% | -2.8% |
| PEG | $33.5 Bil | -2.6% | -4.4% | -7.6% | -14.8% |
| CCI | $30.4 Bil | -3.0% | -4.1% | -6.7% | -21.7% |
| CCL | $30.1 Bil | -2.2% | -2.5% | -15.2% | -27.9% |
| MLM | $29.5 Bil | -1.8% | -1.3% | -7.9% | -20.4% |
| PCG | $27.3 Bil | -3.6% | -7.0% | -31.5% | -14.5% |
| ATO | $26.3 Bil | -0.7% | -3.5% | -6.9% | -1.9% |
| VICI | $25.8 Bil | -1.2% | -1.5% | -9.8% | -19.3% |
| LVS | $25.6 Bil | -1.3% | -4.6% | -16.6% | -24.3% |
| DTE | $25.6 Bil | -2.0% | -5.1% | -8.6% | -6.6% |
| FISV | $24.5 Bil | -0.3% | -7.1% | -13.2% | -64.8% |
| PPL | $24.3 Bil | -1.9% | -3.5% | -7.2% | -6.7% |
| NRG | $21.3 Bil | -2.0% | -6.2% | -9.9% | -40.4% |
| STZ | $20.2 Bil | -0.9% | -5.3% | -15.3% | -10.1% |
| FICO | $19.9 Bil | -3.8% | -11.3% | -24.6% | -42.8% |
| CMS | $19.6 Bil | -1.7% | -4.3% | -7.7% | -7.5% |
| NI | $18.8 Bil | -1.6% | -3.5% | -3.9% | -2.4% |
| FIS | $17.9 Bil | -0.8% | -5.9% | -15.3% | -44.3% |
| CHTR | $14.0 Bil | -0.6% | -13.6% | -22.4% | -56.2% |
| TXT | $13.3 Bil | -1.4% | -4.8% | -6.5% | -7.9% |
| PNR | $8.9 Bil | -0.4% | -2.1% | -12.7% | -49.2% |
| WYNN | $8.4 Bil | -1.3% | -3.3% | -18.1% | -34.8% |
The largest name on the list is still growing.
McDonald’s (MCD) stock has declined 11.9% over the last month, a period where the S&P 500 returned +0.8%. Yet the company’s fundamentals over a longer window show a different picture. McDonald’s trades at 19.2 times trailing earnings, and its revenue grew 6.3% over the last twelve months, and its free cash flow yield is 4.6%.
A low price is a question, not an answer.
A 52-week-low list is not an automatic buy signal. It is a list of businesses the market has punished or discarded for some reason. The disciplined approach is to treat the price as the start of a question, not the end of one. The work begins after reading the list: checking the health of the underlying business before deciding if the stock is truly marked down or simply broken.
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.
Catching Falling Prices Is A Skill. Not Needing To Is A Strategy
Buying stocks at 52-week lows works brilliantly on the survivors and painfully on the rest, and nobody rings a bell to tell you which is which. The honest answer for most investors is to stop needing that call.
The Trefis High Quality (HQ) Portfolio holds roughly 30 businesses selected for the traits that make recoveries likely in the first place: consistent cash generation, strong margins, resilient balance sheets. It has a track record of outpacing a benchmark that combines the S&P 500, the S&P MidCap 400, and the Russell 2000. Watch the low list for information; let a disciplined basket do the buying.