2023 market recap: Tech stocks lead Nasdaq's annual gains

As 2023 concludes, a deeper dive into market performance reveals the Nasdaq 100 (^NDX) was a key index to watch, housing outstanding annual performances by tech leaders Tesla (TSLA) and Meta (META).

Yahoo Finance Markets Reporter Jared Blikre takes a closer look at the aspects of the stock market that stood out, including bitcoin (BTC-USD) and meme stocks, in his year-in-review analysis.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

Video transcript

- 2023 coming to a close for the market. We're going to get a deeper dive on the performance. Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre has the recap. Hey, Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: Hey, there. Well, let's take a look at the NASDAQ 100. That's the index to look at. That's where the Mag Seven is by the way.

Talking about the mag five or the top five a little bit ago. But here's where the action was concentrated. Tesla up 101%.

Meta about the same size, doubled. You see Amazon up 80%. NVIDIA up 240%.

But let me go through the sectors. Been really interesting to see how this breaks down and to see the game of catch up we had at the end of the year. These top three, which housed the mega-caps that's XLK with tech.

Communications services also above 50%. And communications-- excuse me, discretionary, that's consumer discretionary up 38.5%. Those have been the leaders all year long.

But we did have some other sectors catch up over the last two months. And that would be financials, real estate, also industrials. So talking with Steve Sosnick about value and growth. Value did a tremendous job of catch up this year.

And let me put our leaders on the year to date. And you can really see Bitcoin by far and away the biggest leader. Here for the year, got a couple of different measures there.

New York Fang, that's basically the Mag Seven up 96%. Ark, that's disruption up 67%. Chip stocks, homebuilders, software.

The queues that's the NASDAQ 100 over 50%. So a lot of love for a lot of different sectors. But not all of them.

Here's solar. That's down 26%. Cannabis down 24%.

Solar by the way, had a nice comeback. But you take a look at cannabis. And I did a deeper dive on some of the industries and stocks that were pandemic darlings or darlings before then.

A lot of these are just not coming back. You can see that's not much of a comeback story compared to this five years of prior price action. Let me just show you what's happened with meme stocks because it has been a game of have and have nots this year.

Coinbase with the Resurrection of Bitcoin finally coming out of that, exiting out of that the winter for crypto. That's up almost 400%. Palantir up 167%.

But some of these names probably not going to come back for a while. And included in that is AMC. And let me just see if I can find that real quick.

It is a much smaller stock than it used to be. That is down 85% for the year. That's kind of an ugly chart.

And on the two-year, you can see it's down 97%. In terms of the US versus the entire world, we saw a lot of bullishness around the world. I have the NASDAQ up 43%.

Not exactly the US benchmark. That would be the S&P 500. But that's the leader there.

The Nikkei, that benchmark is up 28%. Arguably, the global leader there in front of the S&P 500. Then we have Spain, we have Brazil, Germany, Korea.

So a lot of bullishness to be celebrated around the world. We'll have to see what happens in 2024.

- We will indeed. Jared, thank you so much for that roundup. Really good stuff. I love the check on the meme stocks.

JARED BLIKRE: You bet.

- Sorry, Apes. Not a great year for you.