Large Cap Stocks At 52-Week Highs: Friday’s Full List
A short list of stocks at new highs shows a wide gap between price and recent performance.
Apple (AAPL) is the largest company on the list, with a market value of about $4998.8 billion. As of Friday, September 25, there are 6 Large Cap US and Canada-listed stocks in the Trefis coverage universe trading at their 52-week highs.
The list is short, but some of the one-month price moves are not. Two names posted very strong gains while the S&P 500 returned just +1.0%. This raises the question of how closely a stock’s price run tracks its underlying business trend.
Friday’s Full 52-Week-High List
Here are all 6 names, sorted by market capitalization, with returns over four windows:
| Tickers | Market Cap |
1D % Chg |
1W % Chg |
1M % Chg |
1Y % Chg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AAPL | $4,998.76 Bil | 1.5% | 1.5% | 8.8% | 35.7% |
| AMD | $1,029.19 Bil | 0.2% | 12.6% | 31.1% | 292.0% |
| MRNA | $79.15 Bil | 2.1% | 29.1% | 32.9% | 668.5% |
| WBD | $77.49 Bil | 0.1% | 11.0% | 7.3% | 55.7% |
| NTRA | $59.11 Bil | 0.9% | 11.7% | 21.9% | 151.7% |
| WAT | $42.58 Bil | 0.8% | 2.8% | 4.7% | 48.1% |
This screen covers US and Canada-listed stocks in the Trefis coverage universe. Large Cap here means a market value above $40 billion.
A stock’s one-month gain can diverge from its twelve-month results.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Moderna (MRNA) both trade at their highest price of the past year. AMD stock has gained 31.1% over the last month. The company trades at 160.0 times trailing earnings, and its revenue grew 39.5% over the last twelve months, and its operating margin was 15.7%.
Moderna had the strongest one-month run on the list, up 32.9%. Yet its revenue declined 27.7% over the last twelve months.
A high price is a question, not an answer.
A 52-week-high list is a simple screen for strength. Stocks that are working often continue to work. But a price is not a verdict on a company, and a new high does not automatically make a stock a good investment.
The disciplined move is to treat the high as a prompt. It is an invitation to check whether the business itself, through its own growth and margins, is earning the market’s new appraisal.
Before chasing any name on this list, ask what the company itself expects next. Our Guidance Momentum screen surfaces the stocks whose managements just raised their own outlooks.
One more pattern worth noticing: 3 of the 6 names are Health Care stocks. When a whole group is making new highs together, a health care ETF like XLV, which holds 2 of these names, is one way to own part of the group’s strength without betting on which single name leads it from here.
New Highs Fade. Discipline Compounds
Some of the names on this list will keep setting highs for years, and some are at the top of their run right now. Sorting one from the other, name by name, every day, is the work most investors never keep up with.
That sorting is what the Trefis High Quality (HQ) Portfolio does systematically: about 30 quality businesses screened for the fundamentals that sustain a run, held with rules instead of excitement. It has a track record of outpacing a benchmark that combines the S&P 500, the S&P MidCap 400, and the Russell 2000. Use the high list for ideas; use the portfolio for the compounding.