One of the benefits of weaker markets is that potential leaders stand out like sore thumbs.
While headline indexes struggle to claw their way back to previous highs and former leaders get rejected in the face of overhead resistance, the next leaders continue getting bid up by deep-pocketed investors.
Cabot Growth Investor’s Mike Cintolo uses relative performance to pinpoint these opportunities, and Cabot Options Trader’s Jacob Mintz likes to target stocks that are seeing a lot of bullish call buying.
Both are tried and true methods for identifying potential winners, but today I wanted to use a simpler method that takes little more than a few seconds and a stock screener.
Simply put, we’re going to look for stocks hitting all-time highs on down days.
Obviously, you’ll want to do more research before buying any names that you identify this way, but it’s an excellent way to fill out a watchlist.
Today, we’re going to screen for large-cap stocks hitting all-time highs.
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Why Large-Cap Stocks?
The rationale for filtering for large-cap stocks is two-fold:
Small- and mid-cap stocks are more susceptible to false breakouts and overreactions. As an example, today, D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) is hitting all-time highs on news that its most recent system is commercially available through its cloud service to researchers and governments.
This is a nice step forward for the company but doesn’t yet address our root skepticism towards quantum computing stocks (at this stage). Major spikes higher in lower-volume stocks are very susceptible to mean reversion.
- Large-cap stocks have been the best performers of the latest bull phase (up 100% in the last five years, compared to a 79% return for mid-cap stocks and a 66% return for small-cap stocks). Although they’ve historically underperformed small caps over the long haul, the performance (at least for the time being) is what it is.
So the first element of our screen is large-cap stocks or bigger.
The second element is straightforward: we’ll simply screen for stocks hitting all-time highs using Finviz (our preferred free screening tool; all-time highs is one of their “Technical” criteria).
That screen (at the time of writing) produced 17 large-cap stocks trading at all-time highs. A big share of those names are companies you’re likely familiar with (especially if you subscribe to Top Ten Trader), and any one of them is probably worth paying closer attention to, but I want to focus on three names that stand out in particular.
3 Large-Cap Stocks at All-Time Highs
Netflix (NFLX)
Netflix is the hands-down leader in the streaming game and likely needs no introduction. It’s also a stock that a number of analysts (including myself and fellow Street Check host Chris Preston) have been bullish on for a long time.
From a technical standpoint, shares look pristine, reliably pushing to new highs after finding solid support at their 2025 lows. Plus, unlike many other names out there (and the headline indexes), NFLX never cracked its 200-day line.
They’re probably a bit overheated right now, given how far they’ve stretched above their 50-day moving average (some consolidation/retest of that line like we saw last fall wouldn’t be a huge surprise), but Netflix looks like it can keep running for as long as the bull market is intact.
GE Vernova (GEV)
We wrote up GE Vernova a bit last year due to its impressive performance relative to its utility peers, and the stock has just continued to run from there.
The company is a product of the split-up of General Electric, which was finalized in April of last year. The company operates in three segments (Power, Wind and Electrification) while also emphasizing research on potential “breakthrough” technologies in energy storage, hydrogen, carbon capture, small modular nuclear reactors, advanced wind turbines, and electrification software.
Energy was an incredibly popular trade on Wall Street due to the AI/data center power demand angle but took a major hit in January on news of China’s DeepSeek (lower-power AI model).
And GEV shares took a major beating, losing 38% of their value in less than two months, but shares bottomed in April with the market as a whole and have rebounded hard to tag new highs.
With a trailing PE of 66(!!!), it’s definitely an outlier for utility stocks, but the momentum is undeniable.
CoreWeave (CRWV)
CoreWeave is a new name on Wall Street (probably the most anticipated IPO of 2025), but it’s obviously been a big winner.
Tyler Laundon highlighted it back in January (you can read more about CoreWeave and another highly anticipated IPO here), but in a nutshell, the company rents Nvidia-chip-equipped computer services to artificial intelligence (AI) app developers. This gives CoreWeave a GPU-as-a-service business model and makes it a competitor to the big cloud computing mega-caps, like Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG) that have begun to build their own AI accelerator chips in order to reduce reliance on Nvidia.
Shares have only been public for about two months, but in that time, they’ve essentially gone vertical, rising 173%.
The company isn’t profitable (yet), and all the risks of recent IPOs apply, which might make CRWV a bit hot to handle.
Nonetheless, shares shook off their post-IPO droop (falling while the broader market was recovering) and have since gone on a high-volume run. Shares were up almost 20% on Wednesday alone, so you may want to give them a few days to settle out before you consider jumping in.
My favorite name on this list remains Netflix, but as you can see from the momentum, the market loves all three of them.
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