Nearly two-thirds of S&P 500 stocks are trailing an index up more than 13% this year

Split the 2026 field and a middle group appears. Four in 10 members are down on the year ^[3], so six in 10 are flat or up. Every stock beating an index up 13% has gained, so about 25% of the S&P 500 made money this year and still trailed it ^[2]. Another 15% are down, but by less than 10% ^[3].

Adam Parker's ten-year numbers at Trivariate Research show where that gap comes from. The decade's winners beat the index by an average of 600%, and the losers trailed it by an average of 205% ^[8]. If those are simple averages across stocks, an equal-weighted basket of the whole market finished about 20 points behind the index: 23% of stocks times 600 is 138, and 77% times 205 is about 158 ^[4]. The benchmark is weighted by market value ^[18], so the minority that wins grows into a larger share of it. The post's own version is that "the winners more than make up for the losers" ^[14].

A skew that wide makes thin breadth a weak argument for stock picking. "You could make the case that this is the hardest environment of all-time for active managers," the post's author wrote ^[12]. A few lines later: "If you were meaningfully different from the market cap weighted index, you likely had a difficult time" ^[13]. The same post calls this "one of the best times to outperform as an individual investor" ^[17], because buying familiar tech names such as Apple and Microsoft and holding them worked ^[16]. This year's 35% beats the ten-year 23%, in line with the post's finding that one year has been the easier horizon to win over ^[10]. Both are far below the 60% to 70% win rates of the years after the dot-com bubble burst ^[11].

There are three ways this resolves. Concentration persists, and the index keeps beating most of its members. Concentration fades, as the post expects: "I suppose it's possible mega caps will rule the stock market for all of eternity but I wouldn't bet on it" ^[15]. Or leadership rotates among new outliers while breadth stays thin; this year has some of that, with SanDisk, Dell, Intel and CrowdStrike among the triple-digit gainers and Netflix down 24% ^[6][5]. The post does not give the largest companies' share of index weight, so the concentration risk inside the 13% gain cannot be sized from it.

I think the evidence favors the index holder. A stock picked at random this year had about a 35% chance of beating the index, and one held for ten years had 23% ^[2][7]. The index holder spends no time hunting for the 19 stocks that doubled ^[6] and still collects their gains. That view is wrong if win rates climb back toward the 60% to 70% range of the post-dot-com years ^[11].