By Caitlin McCabe
Hopes that tensions in the Middle East were starting to ease sent stocks surging last week, with the S&P 500 closing at all-time highs three days in a row.
Beneath the surface, however, the rally looked somewhat less robust.
Indicators of market breadth show that this month's rebound remains somewhat narrow-which, typically, isn't a great sign for the sustainability of a stock rally.
This month's rally has been primarily driven by tech shares, with stocks including Intel, Sandisk and Advanced Micro Devices surging more than 30% this month through Friday. Other S&P 500 sectors like energy, utilities and healthcare have lagged dramatically behind.
In fact, when the S&P 500 cruised to a new all-time high for the first time since the war began last Wednesday, just 11 stocks in the index hit a 52-week high on an intraday basis. That rate improved as the week went on, especially during Friday's rally that came after Iran said the Strait of Hormuz was "completely open." Some 48 stocks, or just under 10% of the index, hit new 52-day highs that day.
Other measures of breadth also look relatively weak. The benchmark S&P 500 outperformed its equally weighted counterpart-which gives equal sway to every company in the index-by more than 3 percentage points this month through Friday. That underscores how the rally has been driven more by the index's biggest companies than by broad participation across the market.
That being said, there are some signs that breadth is improving. On Friday, about 60% of S&P 500 stocks closed above their 200-day moving average. That's a far cry from the bull market of 2021, when that metric frequently topped 90%. But it's an improvement from just a few weeks ago, when investors' nerves about the war were most frayed.
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 20, 2026 09:50 ET (13:50 GMT)
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