Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnADVERTISEMENTRob IsbittsMon, June 22, 2026 at 10:17 PM GMT+2 5 min readThe S&P 500 ETF (SPY) closed 2025 at a dollar price of $682 per share. Last Friday, it closed at $747, up $65 and just shy of a 10% gain. That sounds like a great half-year for the stock market. It’s too bad that the entire gain came from less than 5% of the stocks.Screenshot courtesy of Rob IsbittsHeadlines routinely point to that most popular market benchmark, the S&P 500 Index ($SPX), coasting along in positive territory as proof that the broader U.S. economy has successfully navigated its way through various macroeconomic headwinds.More News from BarchartDear Microsoft Stock Fans, Mark Your Calendars for June 30Micron Technology Earnings: Bull Put Spread TradeD-Wave Just Unveiled a Major Quantum Breakthrough. QBTS Stock Looks Ready for Another Surge.Tired of missing midday reversals? The FREE Barchart Brief newsletter keeps you in the know. Sign up now!But if you look behind the capitalization-weighted curtain, the consensus narrative completely falls apart. The truth is that the headline average is serving as a grand optical illusion, masking a quiet, widespread erosion eating away at corporate America.The Secret S&P 500 StormAccording to an analysis by Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok, a sharp divide has emerged beneath the surface of the market’s advance. The index’s gains this year have been driven almost entirely by artificial intelligence-related companies and energy stocks. When you strip out those two segments, the remaining stocks are actually in the red for 2026. Mr. Slok cited that more than 490 stocks have netted out to zero.My analysis was a bit wider in that I found the 23 stocks above as the ones adding up to nearly a 10% gain so far this year. But either way, the key takeaway is the same:Today’s stock market is a ghost town. From a distance, if you squint, it looks like a real city.This extreme, lopsided divergence isn’t just an interesting statistical quirk. It is exactly the type of behavior you see right before a major, cyclical bear market takes hold.The Historical Receipts of Narrow BreadthHistory shows us that markets like this, which quietly send most stocks into retreat, typically mean that the market is reaching a point of terminal exhaustion. This specific fragmentation has preceded almost every major market crash of the last century:1929In the months leading up to the Great Crash, the broad market had already stopped rising. A massive public obsession with a tiny handful of speculative market leaders — like Radio Corporation of America (RCA) — kept the headline indexes afloat while the underlying credit markets and industrial sectors began to decay.Terms and Privacy PolicyPrivacy & Cookie SettingsMore Info