Biggest Stock Gainers: What the S&P 500's Top Stock of the Day Did Next
Michael Whitman
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Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020
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YouTube creator, 137K subscribers
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Published 2026-11-07
From May 2016 to November 2026, the S&P 500's biggest daily gainer kept no momentum: it rose the next day 49.9% of the time and trailed the average member by 0.07 points over a month. A year later it averaged +16.26% against +13.50%, but its median was +8.37% and one in ten fell 36.7% or more.
Every market site lists today’s top gainers. None shows what a reader wants next: did the jump keep going? Here is the measured answer for the single best S&P 500 stock on each of 2,637 trading days, May 13, 2016 to November 6, 2026, tracked one session, five sessions, 21 sessions and 252 sessions later.
Get the file: every one of the 2,637 days in one CSV. The tables, charts and file are free to reuse if you name Whitman Trading and link here (site license).
| Dataset | Covers | Pages citing it | Download |
|---|---|---|---|
| S&P 500 biggest daily gainer and what it did next, 2016-2026 | 2,637 trading days, May 13, 2016 to November 6, 2026: the best one-day return among S&P 500 members, and the next 1, 5, 21 and 252 trading days | 1 | All 2,637 days (CSV) |
Findings you can quote
| After the jump | Days measured | Biggest gainer: average | Biggest gainer: median | Biggest gainer rose | All members rose (same windows) | Average member stock | S&P 500 (SPY) | Gap vs average member (95% range) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Next day | 2,636 | +0.03% | +0.00% | 49.9% | 52.2% | +0.06% | +0.06% | −0.03 pts (−0.16 to +0.09) |
| Next 5 days | 2,632 | +0.23% | +0.19% | 51.5% | 54.3% | +0.28% | +0.30% | −0.05 pts (−0.31 to +0.21) |
| Next month (21 days) | 2,616 | +1.07% | +0.82% | 53.4% | 56.4% | +1.14% | +1.29% | −0.07 pts (−0.69 to +0.60) |
| Next year (252 days) | 2,385 | +16.26% | +8.37% | 59.6% | 64.8% | +13.50% | +15.91% | +2.76 pts (−2.08 to +6.82) |
- The typical top gainer rose 7.69% on its day. It gained 10% or more on 854 of the 2,637 days (32.4%) and 20% or more on 104. The largest was Moderna, +177.0% on August 19, 2026.
- No follow-through the next day. The median next-day move was +0.00%, and the stock closed higher 49.9% of the time.
- A year on, it beat SPY in only 41.6% of cases and the average member in 44.9%, while SPY itself rose in 86.8% of those windows.
- 479 different stocks topped the list. AMD led it 50 times, Tesla and Moderna 39 each. In 14.8% of cases the same stock was the day’s best again within a month.
- The jumps have grown. The median top gain was 6.2% to 6.7% in each year from 2016 to 2019. In 2026 to November 6 it was 11.3%, and 132 of 214 days had a leader up 10% or more.
How it works: the study in brief
The method is the one used for our biggest stock losers study, run from the same downloaded files, with the ranking flipped to pick the best stock instead of the worst. In short: S&P 500 membership is rebuilt for each day from Wikipedia’s change log, so a stock counts only while it was in the index.
Returns are Yahoo Finance adjusted closes, so dividends and splits are in; a day is used once at least 400 members have prices (first on May 13, 2016; 465 members on the median day).
Each result is compared with SPY and with the equal-weighted average member over the same window, measured from the close of the jump day. The 95% ranges come from a block bootstrap that keeps overlapping windows together.
One rule is new here. Yahoo sometimes books a spin-off as a stock split, which can turn an ordinary day into a fake leap: Xerox shows +37.6% on January 3, 2017, the day it separated from Conduent.
A big gain is exactly what this study hunts for, so on any “split” with an odd ratio that ordinary share splits don’t use (Xerox’s was 1.518 to 1), that stock is left out of that day’s ranking. That removed 62 stock-days. The 40 largest gains left were then checked one by one against Yahoo’s raw prices.
A worked example: PG&E and Palantir
PG&E (PCG), November 16, 2018. The close rose from $17.74 to $24.40: 24.40 ÷ 17.74 = 1.3754, a gain of 37.5% in one session. It slipped 4.7% the next day. On November 19, 2019, 252 trading days later, it closed at $6.84: 6.84 ÷ 24.40 = 0.2803, a loss of 72.0%, while the average member gained 14.4%.
Palantir (PLTR), November 5, 2024. From $41.41 to $51.13: 51.13 ÷ 41.41 = 1.2347, up 23.5%. It added 8.6% the next day. On November 7, 2025 it closed at $177.93: 177.93 ÷ 51.13 = 3.4800, a gain of 248.0%, against 7.0% for the average member.
Put the pair together and the “average top gainer” made 88% in a year. Neither investor saw anything like 88%: one lost most of the money, the other more than tripled it. Big one-day winners land in the tails far more often than they land on the average.
The original data
The gainer’s bar and the loser’s bar are nearly the same shape. A year after a top gain, one in ten stocks had fallen 36.7% or more and one in ten had risen 72.6% or more. An ordinary member stock stayed between −23.7% and +51.6%. The gainer’s median, +8.4%, sits below a random member’s +10.0%.
The day’s biggest loser, from our companion study, spans −35.7% to +71.9% with a median of +9.4%.
Top gainers and top losers are mostly the same stocks
If the gainers list picked “strong” companies and the losers list “weak” ones, the two lists would hold different names. They don’t.
- 437 of the 479 stocks that were ever the day’s biggest gainer were also, on some other day, its biggest loser.
- On 674 of the 2,637 gainer days (25.6%), the same stock was the day’s biggest loser within 21 trading days before or after.
- On 44 days (1.7%) the top gainer was the previous day’s top loser.
What both lists mostly select is volatility: stocks whose price swings hard in both directions. That explains why the outcome spreads match. A one-day leader is a sign that a stock moves a lot, much more than a sign of which way it moves next. Our historical volatility page shows how that swing size is measured.
Does the size of the jump matter?
Each cell is the top gainer’s return minus the average member’s, in points, grouped by the size of the jump:
| One-day gain | Days | Next day | Next month | Next year | Next year, 95% range |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Less than 5% | 550 | +0.13 pts | −0.07 pts | +0.15 pts | −6.89 to +4.71 |
| 5% to 10% | 1,233 | −0.07 pts | +0.04 pts | +2.07 pts | −3.07 to +5.31 |
| 10% to 20% | 750 | +0.02 pts | −0.32 pts | +4.12 pts | −0.74 to +10.50 |
| 20% or more | 104 | −0.72 pts | +0.55 pts | +18.88 pts | +5.10 to +26.26 |
The biggest jumps gave back the most the next day (−0.72 points), then led by the widest margin a year later. The 20%-or-more group is the only one whose one-year range stays above zero.
That headline needs three warnings. Only 83 of those 104 days have a full year of data yet.
The median case was just 0.53 points ahead, so a few runs did the work: Intel after September 18, 2025 (+298% in a year), Kohl’s after April 7, 2020 (+262%) and Palantir after November 5, 2024 (+248%).
Last, this page runs 24 comparisons (four gain sizes and two market groups at four horizons), so one clearing zero is close to what luck alone hands out. Leaving out 2020, when 24 of these jumps came during the COVID crash and rebound, the average lead is still +17.42 points.
Gaining while the market fell
On 1,177 days (44.6%), the top gainer rose while SPY closed lower. Those leaders rose less, a median of 6.72%, against 8.53% when SPY finished up or unchanged.
| Day of the jump | Days | Next day gap | Next month gap | Next year gap | Next year, 95% range |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SPY fell that day | 1,177 | −0.02 pts | −0.45 pts | −0.01 pts | −3.69 to +2.15 |
| SPY rose or was flat | 1,460 | −0.04 pts | +0.24 pts | +4.97 pts | −1.98 to +9.73 |
A stock that rose against a falling market sounds like strength. In this data it was not: a year later it did exactly as well as the average member, −0.01 points. Leaders on rising days were ahead by 4.97 points, but that range also includes zero, so the two groups cannot be told apart.
Survivorship bias: the missing names
A study built from today’s lists can quietly drop the companies that failed or were bought.
What is in. A company that has since left the index still counts for the stretch when it was a member, as long as Yahoo has its old prices. On 474 of the 2,637 days the top gainer has since left the S&P 500; Enphase Energy, Bath & Body Works and Etsy appear most.
What leaving them out would do. Rerun with only the stocks in the index today, the 1,738 days from December 9, 2019 to November 6, 2026 put the one-year average at +21.27%, against +19.05% with point-in-time members: 2.2 points too flattering.
What is still missing. On a typical day 91.5% of members have usable prices; the share climbs from 81.4% in 2016 to 99.2% in 2026. The gaps are mostly takeover targets, plus a few failures. The survivorship bias page explains why the true numbers are probably a little lower.
When it fails
The mean is not the typical result. The one-year average sits 7.9 points above the median, and the median top gainer lagged the average member by 4.10 points. Oracle jumped 36.0% on September 10, 2025 and was down 53.7% a year later.
The price is the jump-day close. Nobody knows the day’s winner until the bell, so buying at that closing price, free of spreads, commissions and tax, is a best case.
New spin-offs start from a thin market. On a spin-off’s first regular trading day, the one-day gain is measured from its “when-issued” price, quoted before the shares were handed out.
Two leaders are such days: Carrier on April 3, 2020 (+27.4%) and Amentum on September 30, 2024 (+25.6%). Leaving them out changes the 20%-or-more group’s one-year lead from +18.88 to +18.91 points.
Fewer independent years than it looks. The 2,385 one-year windows overlap heavily; a decade only contains about ten that don’t, so the one-year ranges stay wide.
Each leader had a different catalyst. Every leader jumped on news of some kind, an earnings beat, a buyout, trial data or a short squeeze, and each kind behaves differently afterward (see stock catalyst). Nothing here says the next leader will keep rising, or fall back.
Cite this study
Michael Whitman, Whitman Trading. “Biggest Stock Gainers: What the S&P 500’s Top Stock of the Day Did Next.” whitmantrading.com, November 7, 2026. https://whitmantrading.com/research/biggest-stock-gainers/ Data: Yahoo Finance daily adjusted closes; point-in-time S&P 500 members from Wikipedia’s change log.
Embed the chart by pasting this snippet into your page; keep the source link in place:
<figure>
<img src="https://whitmantrading.com/img/charts/m116-gainers-1y-spread.svg" width="720" alt="One-year returns after the S&P 500's biggest daily gainer and loser, 2016 to 2026, against a random member stock: both lists show much wider tails.">
<figcaption>Source: <a href="https://whitmantrading.com/research/biggest-stock-gainers/">Whitman Trading, what the S&P 500's biggest daily gainer did next</a></figcaption>
</figure>
Questions people ask
What are the biggest stock gainers today?
They are the stocks with the largest percentage rise from the previous close, and the list resets every session. Market sites carry live versions; most include small companies, while this study uses only S&P 500 members and looks at what happened after 2,637 past leaders.
Do top gainers keep rising the next day?
Not in this data. The day’s best S&P 500 stock closed higher the next day 49.9% of the time, with a median move of +0.00%, a little worse than all members over the same day.
Should you buy the top gainer of the day?
The data shows no dependable edge either way over a day or a month, and far wider outcomes than a random member over a year. Whether chasing a move suits anyone depends on much more than one day; the momentum trading and mean reversion pages cover how those two opposite ideas are tested.
How often does the best S&P 500 stock rise 10% or more?
On 854 of 2,637 trading days since May 2016 (32.4%). In 2026 to November 6 it happened on 132 of 214 days.
Related
The biggest stock losers study is the mirror image of this page. All the site’s studies and downloads are on the research page, and the rules for recomputing every number are on how this site is made.
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.