Summary

Most stocks took a breather on Wednesday, with NYSE decliners leading advancers by 1,100 issues. But the trillion-dollar club continued to add to their huge gains off the early April lows. Three of the top seven gainers in the S&P 500 are in this rare club. On the day, Information Technology, Communication Services, and Consumer Discretionary all rose slightly -- and that helped the Nasdaq pop 0.7% and the Nasdaq 100 tack on 0.6%. The biggest reason that the major indices have rallied so much is the performance of the largest market-cap stocks. By size, and over the past month, MSFT has gained 16%, NVDA has risen 22%, AMZN has tacked on 15%, META is up 24%, TSLA has rocketed 38%, and AVGO has surged 30%. The other largest stocks (GOOGL, AAPL, and BRK.B) have not really participated. The market caps of the big gainers range from $1.1 trillion to $3.4 trillion. Within IT, semiconductors probably have added the most to the recent gains, as the iShares Semiconductor (SOXX) has soared 38% over the 24 days ending May13. That's the largest 24-day run for the chips since early 2000; after rebounding