Finally! It took 15 years for the Nasdaq index to top its dot-com era peak on Thursday.
It was a marathon run, and every marathon has its winners. While many stocks helped the Nasdaq to bounce back, some added more momentum than others.
Many people are familiar with the phenomenal gains that Apple has had in the past 15 years. It rose over 2,800%. To put that another way, if you had invested $100 in Apple stock on March 9, 2000 (the day before the dot-com peak), you would have more than $2,900 today.
But that stellar performance by Apple was only good enough for 7th place. The top Nasdaq stock since the dot-com bubble burst is Monster Beverage. It’s up an astounding 52,500%, according to a CNNMoney analysis of Factset data.
Coming in second is Keurig Green Mountain with nearly a 22,000% bounce.
Not another bubble: The fact that the top slots belong to beverage companies illustrate just how much the Nasdaq has changed since its dot-com era days. In 2000, the Nasdaq was 65% tech companies. Now it’s only 42%.
That more balanced growth has helped ease fears that a bubble is back.
“Most of the [Nasdaq] companies today are trading at much more reasonable valuations than they were at March of 2000,” notes Kate Warne, an investment strategist at Edward Jones.
On Thursday, the Nasdaq set an intraday record of 5,143.32, beating the previous all-time high of 5,132.52 from March 10, 2000.
The slow pokes: It’s also amusing to look at the Nasdaq marathon laggards. Only 20 stocks that were in the Nasdaq in March of 2000 still haven’t bounced back above their level then. At the top of the “bad performers” club is Sirius XM, which returned nearly -100% in the past 15 years.
This analysis of best and worst stocks only looks at companies in the Nasdaq 100 index. Several notable companies, especially in the tech space, were not part of the Nasdaq in 2000 such as Facebook, Google and Netflix. They are excluded from this list, although it’s telling that Netflix, which debuted in May 2002, is up 7,827% since it started trading.
Here’s a look at Nasdaq’s best and worst performers since the dot-com peak:
The best of Nasdaq:
1. Monster Beverage Corp, +52,560%
2. Keurig Green Mountain, +21,914%
3. Tractor Supply Company, +8,459%
4. Gilead Science, +5,315%
5. Express Scripts, +4,260%
6. O’Reilly Automotive, +4,094%
7. Apple., +2,829%
8. Stericycle, +2,813%
9. Ross Store, +2,314%
10. Cognizant Technology Solutions, +2,213%
The worst of Nasdaq:
1. Sirius XM Holdings, -94%
2. Akamai Technologies, -74%
3. NetApp, -72%
4. Broadcom Corportation, -66%
5. Applied Materials, -58.3%
6.Cisco Systems, -58%
7. Micron Technology, -56%
8. Yahoo!, -55%
9. CA, Inc., -54%
10. Intel, -45%
