So far this year, 25 stocks in the S&P 500 are up 20%. What should you do with them?

The S&P 500 is off to a flyer this year, but beneath the surface of the headline index, a handful of names are absolutely ripping. While the broader market debates the “soft landing” versus “no landing” scenarios, these 25 stocks have already cleared the +20% hurdle less than a month into the year.

The clear standout is Sandisk ($SNDK), which has nearly doubled in value (+99.6%) following a massive re-rating in the storage and memory space. It’s not alone; the semiconductor and equipment trade is dominating the leaderboards, with Micron (+40%), Western Digital (+37.2%), and Lam Research (+27.3%) all riding the wave of high-performance computing demand.

Here is a look at the top performers so far this year:

Intel was near the top of this list until Friday’s nearly 20% decline. That’s a demonstration of the risk of wading into some of these volatile stocks.

More importantly, what does the return of those stocks tell us about how they will do the rest of the way? Here is a look at some of the top performers in January 2025?

As we’ve seen many times in markets, winners tend to keep on winning. That said, the top performer in 2024 in January was Super Micro (SMCI) with an 89% gain but over the remainder of the year, it gave much of it back. Nvidia though gained 24% and went into gain 171%.

What you’re looking for here are lasting themes and the question is whether you like the memory supply cruch? Higher US defense spending? Moderna making an MRNA breakthrough including with a better seasonal flu vaccine? Oil services? Gold? Lithium? Electricity?

To me, many of those themes sound tired, but you could say the same about Nvidia and AI in early 2024.

For reference, the 2025 winners and how they later did: