Everywhere you look these days, you can find crazy things going on with the market. A case in point is the Nasdaq 100’s performance relative to the performance of the S&P 500. In early afternoon trading, the Nasdaq 100 is on pace for its 12th straight day of outperforming the S&P 500. That’s a streak that has only been exceeded two other times (July 2005 and July 2017) since 1996, and there have only been a total of six streaks where the Nasdaq 100 outperformed the S&P 500 for ten or more trading days.

During this 12-day span of outperformance for the Nasdaq 100, it has rallied 4.7% compared to a decline of 0.73% for the S&P 500 for a gap of 5.4%. That may sound like a pretty widespread, but it has hardly been out of the norm in the post-COVID period. As shown in the chart below, there have been several times over the last three years where the 12-day performance spread has been as high or higher than it is now. During the post-Financial Crisis period from 2010 up until the end of 2019, the spread oscillated in a relatively tight range. Before that, though, the performance spread between the two indices was also routinely as large as it is now, especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s when it dwarfed the current range. While the steady pace of days where the Nasdaq 100 has outperformed the S&P 500 has been unusual, the performance gap between the two has been anything but. 

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