The Best-Performing Stocks in 2026 (By One-Year Returns)

2026 has had some major ups and downs for the major stock market indexes. The Iran war has threatened the global supply of oil, sending energy prices soaring and spooking investors. Treasury yields are surging, and now investors are worried about the prospect of further Fed interest rate hikes.

But investors have also been quick to celebrate any news (or even rumors) about peace deal progress, as well as economic data that could hint at how the Fed might act. Plus, strong performance from the tech sector has provided fundamental strength to the market, while adding a large dash of volatility throughout the year.

Below, we’re listing the best S&P 500 stocks based on one-year returns.

Note that these are the best stocks in the S&P 500 right now, based on one-year performance. But that doesn’t mean that they’re the best stocks to invest in. Predicting the future of even the current top-performing stocks is a job even the pros haven’t mastered. And the best stocks for your portfolio aren’t necessarily the best stocks for someone else’s portfolio.

For example, a young person who is looking to aggressively grow their retirement savings (since they have a lot of time to ride out the stock market highs and lows) might gravitate toward growth stocks for their high-risk, high-reward volatility. On the other hand, a retiree who is looking for passive income might prefer predictable dividend stocks like the dividend aristocrats, which are relatively stable and typically increase their dividend payments over time.

Choosing good stocks for your portfolio can be a time-consuming task, and you need to look beyond performance metrics like the ones on this page. Yes, it’s a good sign if a stock is able to outperform during periods of market volatility and the broad market declines like we saw in 2022 (the last year the S&P 500 saw an annual decline). But as referenced above, there are a number of other factors to consider.

Beyond your own personal risk tolerance and how long you plan to invest, strategic investors do significant research into a company before buying its stock. They perform fundamental analysis, which involves looking at the company’s financial statements and considering how economic factors might influence the stock’s future performance.

Many investors also do technical analysis of a stock, which means analyzing historical movements in the stock’s price to attempt to predict future movements. If you want to go this route, we have detailed overviews of how to research stocks and how to read stock charts, including key terms to know.

The ideal portfolio composition varies from person to person. Some people like to keep things simple and exclusively invest in index funds, and advisors do often recommend keeping at least some of your portfolio in diversified funds. But there can also be a place for individual stocks — the question is, how much of your portfolio they should make up.

There are two different rules of thumb that are often used to answer this question, and they appeal to investors with different risk tolerances.

The first rule of thumb, which is good for investors who are comfortable with taking on some risk, and like to invest heavily in individual stocks, is to invest no more than 10% of your overall portfolio in a single stock. As far as risk management goes, this is the bare-minimum standard.

Individual stocks sometimes experience big drops — 10% in a single day is not unheard of — and if you’re investing heavily in them, this rule can limit the amount of damage that a decline in a single stock can do to your overall portfolio. (You can even use stop-loss orders to automatically sell a stock that drops 10% or more. If you combine this with the no-more-than-10%-per-stock rule, then you’ve built a system where no investment can shave more than 1% off your overall portfolio per day.)

The other rule of thumb, which is more conservative, and better for hands-off or beginner investors, is to invest no more than 10% of your portfolio in individual stocks overall, and leave the other 90% in index funds.

This approach really limits the amount of portfolio damage that a decline in any individual stock can do, although it also limits your chances of substantially beating the market. If you follow the 90%-index-funds rule, you’ll mostly earn the market rate of return, but you’ll have a little bit of money to trade individual stocks, giving you the opportunity to slightly outperform (or slightly underperform) an index-funds-only investor.

There are a wide variety of stock trading platforms out there, and they have different features that will appeal to investors with different interests and skill levels.

There are two features that are big pluses in terms of making individual stock trading accessible to a wide swath of investors, and fortunately, they’re both pretty common nowadays: Extended hours trading and fractional share trading.

Extended hours trading makes it possible to buy stocks outside of the normal market hours (9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern time), which is a major convenience if you’re located on the West Coast or outside the U.S.

Fractional share trading makes it possible to buy less than one full share of a stock, which is good for low-budget or beginner investors, given that some of the stocks in the table above have share prices over $1,000 (thanks to their strong performance).

Below is a list of brokers reviewed by NerdWallet that offer both extended hours trading and fractional share trading on almost all stocks:

One caveat: It’s worth noting that some brokers don’t offer fractional shares during extended hours. Robinhood, for example, only allows whole-share trades on most securities outside of normal market hours, although it also allows you to queue up a fractional share order for the next trading day.

For more information on brokers that are working to make stock trading more accessible, check out our roundup of the best brokers for beginners.