The S&P 500 just had its worst quarter in years. Here are the biggest winners and losers.
Sandisk and energy stocks soared while software names sank amid a broad sell-off in tech stocks.
The S&P 500 just wrapped up its worst quarter since Q3 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine roiled markets, falling 4.6% in the first three months of 2026. That’s a sharp reversal from last year’s roughly 18% gain, which marked a third straight year of double-digit returns.
Indeed, in a market rattled by soaring oil prices and growing fears of a tech sell-off, no stock stood out more than the flash memory maker that joined the S&P 500 last November. Sandisk topped the benchmark index with a staggering 168% gain in Q1, following a whopping 559% total return in 2025. That puts it on track to top the S&P 500 list back-to-back — a feat that, according to our analysis, no stock has ever accomplished.
The rally has been fueled by insatiable demand from hyperscalers, whose data centers rely on the company’s flash storage to train and serve AI models. The broader memory and optical cohort followed suit, with Lumentum (up 91%), Ciena (up 66%), Western Digital (up 57%) — from which Sandisk was spun off last year — and Seagate (up 42%) all landing in the top 20 performers of the quarter.
Another group of high-flying stocks came from the energy sector, which just posted its second-best quarter on record relative to the S&P 500 ETF since 1999. Fifteen of the top 30 performers were energy and chemical stocks, including APA (up 74%), Occidental Petroleum (up 58%), and Valero (up 52%), as the conflict in the Middle East sent crude prices soaring well above $100 a barrel.
At the other end of the leaderboard, AppLovin, the ad tech firm that surged 108% in 2025, became the worst performer, with a 41% decline in Q1 as short seller reports, a federal investigation, and the broader software collapse weighed on the stock throughout the quarter.
Many of the software names that dominated 2025 were also hammered by the so-called “Saaspocalypse” earlier this year, as the rise of agentic AI fueled fears that enterprise software firms could eventually be displaced. Software and software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies accounted for more than half of the bottom 20 performers in Q1, including Trade Desk (down 40%), Workday (down 40%), Adobe (down 31%), and Salesforce (down 30%).
