7 stocks that gained at least 80% this year
While the S&P 500 has added roughly 13% since the start of the year, several large U.S. companies have more than doubled their value and some have even quadrupled it. These are not small speculative names, but companies with market capitalizations in the hundreds of billions of dollars. What do this year's winners have in common, how expensive are they after such a run, and which metrics should you watch out for because classic screeners often show distorted data for them?
Key points
Seven stocks have left the S&P 500 far behind this year. Their gains are measured in hundreds of percent, yet they are not small speculative companies.
One common megatrend is behind most of this year's winners. But each company profits from a completely different part of the supply chain.
After such huge gains, price starts to matter as much as the business itself. The differences in valuations among the winners are surprisingly large.
Classic screeners fail for these stocks. Some metrics look extremely good or bad for reasons that have little to do with business quality.
Seven different stocks may actually be one big bet. The common source of their growth could also be their biggest risk.
2026 has so far brought an unusually wide gap between winners and the rest of the U.S. stock market. The S&P 500 had gained about 13.1% by Friday's close on September 25, but the median of its members is up only 6%. The average is being pulled up by a handful of names whose gains are measured in hundreds of percent. That is exactly what we focus on in this analysis.
We set a simple filter: we looked for S&P 500 members with year-to-date performance of at least 80% and companies representing different parts of one chain. We deliberately excluded memory chips and flash storage. Even so, the resulting group is remarkably homogeneous. Six of the seven companies profit from hyperscalers, AI labs, and large corporations building data centers faster than suppliers can manufacture. The seventh company, a cybersecurity software maker, benefits from the other side of the same coin: the more AI systems companies deploy, the larger the attack surface they must protect.
So for each name we look not only at why the stock rose, but also how much of future growth is already priced in and which metrics can mislead. Which stocks are they?