#BTC #The loudest investor chatter for months has insisted the heavyweights of the Nasdaq have been everything to the market in 2023. We hear much less about how they've done less than nothing over the past two years. Sunday is the second anniversary of the all-time closing high in both the Nasdaq Composite and Nasdaq 100 indexes, which remain 12% and 4 % underwater even after their monster gains in recent months. It's relatively rare for the Nasdaq 100 – the most easily investable part of the Nasdaq and the one most reflective of the mega-cap dominance – to enter a two-year downturn. The recent phase is the third such episode in nearly 30 years, the prior two being the gutting payback for the still-singular tech bubble and the market-wide carnage of the global financial crisis. As this plot I commissioned from YCharts shows, even at the Covid-crash low, the NDX was merely flat – and almost exactly so, on March 16, 2020 – over the prior two years. This doesn't mean the index must levitate from here, of course. But it's a reminder that with its 45% surge year to date, its near-record outperformance over the average stock and the weighting of the top six Nasdaq names within the S & P 500 up above 27%, most of the move has been a carom effect from the outsized 36% decline into its December 2022 trough. The market looks a lot less top-heavy and stingy over a two-year span, the NDX outperforming the equal-weight S & P 500 by seven percentage points compared to the 42-percentage-point advantage in 2023. QQQ RSP mountain 2021-11-17 Invesco QQQ Trust vs. Invesco S & P Equal Weight ETF Of course, the Nasdaq is simply an amplified version of the overall market, which is also in pretty rare territory sitting on slightly negative two-year performance. Citi chief investment strategist Scott Chronert points out the S & P 500's rolling two-year return "ranks in the 16 th percentile based on a 30-year look-back," which he believes explains the muted character.