The stock market is constantly changing, and what's popular today may not be popular tomorrow. To make sure you're investing in the best stocks, it's important to do your research and understand the market. Our expert analysts can help you detect stocks that are heating up before the crowd swoops in, and our journalists can help you understand the noise to determine if these investments are worth your time. This positions you to benefit from the stock market's average annual return of approximately 10%.
To help you make the most of your investments, we've compiled a list of the best stocks in the S&P 500, measured by year-to-date performance. But predicting the future of even the best-performing stocks is a difficult task, and it's impossible to predict their daily movement with complete precision. That's why it's important to invest for the long term and take advantage of strategies like collecting tax losses. When looking for the best stocks to buy right now, investors should consider long-term performance, not short-term volatility.
Although individual stocks can offer more diversification than equity funds, such as mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs), experts often recommend the latter to maximize their diversification. And the best stocks for your portfolio may not be the best stocks for someone else's portfolio. Many investors also perform technical analysis of a stock, which means analyzing historical movements in the stock price to try to predict future movements. Just be patient for diversified investments, such as index funds, to pay off in the long term, rather than chasing the latest popular stocks.
Choosing good stocks for your portfolio is a relatively time-consuming task, and you should go beyond performance metrics, such as those on this page.