With Wall Street closing out its strongest quarter in more than two years, Richard Peterson, director of Global Markets Intelligence at S&P Capital IQ, has put together a list of the best and worst performing stocks for the first quarter of 2012.
The market sector that has led the S&P 500-stock index’s gains over the past three months is information technology, which is up 21.57 percent since Jan. 1. The utilities sector, which includes companies that deliver utilities such as gas and power, is the worst performing sector, down 3.21 percent since the beginning of the year.
Here are the leaders and laggards in the S&P 500 index for the first quarter:
Leaders:
Sears Holdings Corporation (up 112.6 percent)
Bank of America (up 71.4 percent)
Netflix (up 66 percent)
Whirlpool (up 60.4 percent)
salesforce.com (up 54.2 percent)
priceline.com (up 54 percent)
Regions Financial (up 51.6 percent)
Textron (up 51.3 percent)
Apple (up 50.6 percent)
Advanced Micro Devices (up 50.4 percent)
Laggards:
Apollo Group (down 27.5 percent)
SUPERVALU (down 27 percent)
First Solar (down 25.6 percent)
Alpha Natural Resources (down 25.3 percent)
Frontier Communications (down 20.8 percent)
Cabot Oil & Gas (down 20.3 percent)
Electronic Arts (down 20 percent)
Goodyear Tire & Rubber (down 19.7 percent)
Baker Hughes (down 16.1 percent)
Allegheny Technologies (down 14.9 percent)
