115 stocks are showing strength when the S&P 500 falters, says Evercore. Here are some of them.

115 stocks are showing strength when the S&P 500 falters, says Evercore. Here are some of them.

Steve Goldstein

Wed, September 2, 2026 at 3:29 PM GMT+3 6 min read

• CL00

Bonds are blowing up (in a bad way), so what can an investor do to hedge a portfolio against the risk that the artificial-intelligence trade will fizzle as well?

Earlier this year, famed energy trader John Arnold stumbled on a supersimple portfolio — 50% technology, 50% energy —and, honestly, it's hard to argue with, with a 37% year-to-date advance, according to MarketWatch's latest calculations. Granted, it's by definition not the most diversified grouping, but right now it's a way to ride the AI trade without worrying much about what the U.S. or Iran will do next.

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Evercore strategists led by Julian Emanuel have a different way to hedge. They look for stocks that move in the opposite direction to the market — what, in finance terms, is called negative beta.

They do so in a quantitative way, screening for stocks whose rolling six-month, one-day percentage change is the inverse of the S&P 500 daily's movements. At the start of September, there were 115 such stocks. That is a huge number — there hasn't been anything like it since the dot-com bubble burst.

But, unlike dot-com mania, the AI trade is continuing. "Investors have proactively sought diversification in a bull market world where the top 10 stocks (heavily AI exposed) in the S&P 500 are 38% of the index while index correlations (a mean reverting relationship) sit at generationally attractive lows," said Emanuel and team.

The negative-beta stocks worked particularly well during the volatile phase when the Iran war was first launched, as well as at the time of the blowup of the hedge fund Situational Awareness in July.

This year the basket of negative-beta stocks has delivered results in line with the tech-charged S&P 500. "Buying negative-beta stocks helps a long term oriented portfolio 'ride out' volatility events, with interest rate, geopolitical and midterm election uncertainty the catalysts for another such event as September gets underway," the analysts said.

The list of stocks skews toward energy — just as energy trader Arnold's portfolio relies on those stocks as a geopolitical hedge — but also includes utilities and staples. What's also on the list are insurers, which benefit from higher investment income as yields push to multiyear highs. Evercore only named 20 of those 115 stocks, but its list includes CF Industries CF, APA APA, LyondellBasell Industries LYB, Occidental Petroleum OXY and ConocoPhillips COP.

The market

U.S. stock futures ES00 NQ00 turned higher after early losses. Crude CL00, meanwhile, declined.

Key asset performance

Last

5d

1m

YTD

S&P 500

-0.60%

-1.36%

11.48%

Nasdaq Composite

-0.20%

-1.83%

12.30%

10-year Treasury

Gold

-6.32%

1.07%

0.50%

Oil

10.50%

20.55%

57.66%

Data: MarketWatch. Treasury yields change expressed in basis points

The buzz

Iran on Wednesday fired at U.S. miliary bases across the Gulf region after a U.S. barrage against Iranian military targets, including one that reportedly hit a wedding.

Dell Technologies DELL lifted its revenue and AI server-sales target.

Palo Alto Networks PANW reported stronger-than-forecast results as its CEO said new AI capabilities prompt cybersecurity demand.

MongoDB MDB beat revenue forecasts, but results for its Atlas cloud database disappointed investors.

Broadcom AVGO, which makes custom AI chips for companies including Alphabet's Google, reports results after the close.

Europe's largest airline, Ryanair, said winter jet-fuel prices of $140 per barrel are prompting it to cut capacity.

Chevron CVX announced a plan to expand operations in Venezuela, where a venture it partly owns has been granted additional acreage.

ADP reported 38,000 private-sector jobs were created last month, numbers that shouldn't change expectations for Friday's payrolls numbers very much. The Fed's Beige Book of economic anecdotes is due at 2 p.m.

The Bank of Canada announces an interest-rate decision at 9:45 a.m., where its assessment of the U.S.-Canadian trade spat will be in focus.

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The chart

Hyperscalers are issuing so much debt that they may be causing an imbalance at the long end of the yield curve. JPMorgan Asset Management's Michael Cembalest calculates that the debt issuance by the five hyperscalers, plus Nvidia, equates to 70% of new Treasury long-duration borrowing. He adds that the Treasury twist program of buying back long-dated securities while borrowing more from the short end of the curve pales in comparison to the Fed's program from 2011 and 2012 — at some 25% of that size — while the outstanding stock of Treasurys with maturities longer than 10 years has risen from $1 trillion to $5.8 trillion.

Top tickers

These were the most active stock-market ticker symbols on MarketWatch as of 5 a.m. Eastern.

Ticker symbol

Security name

NVDA

Nvidia

TSLA

Tesla

SPCX

SpaceX

MU

Micron Technology

AAPL

Apple

GME

GameStop

TSM

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

DELL

Dell Technologies

AMD

Advanced Micro Devices

META

Meta Platforms

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Beyond the newsroom

MarketWatch Picks: The highest CD rates of September 2026: Up to 9% APY

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