Happy Kickoff to Q2 and Happy April Fool’s Day!
Speaking of fools, I felt like one for a moment this morning during an interview with my buddies Joel Elconin, Dennis Dick, and 800 of their loyal followers on their popular Pre-Market Prep show. Congrats, by the way, to Joel and Dennis for breaking away from Benzinga to run their own show on their own terms — well done, gents!
We hit on multiple areas of the market during the discussion, but one topic in particular caught me off guard.
Dennis brought up a segment on CNBC where the in-house CNBC technician Carter Worth — a role I used to share with him before fading away from Fast Money over the last few years, by either choice or chance — talked about the returns of Utilities vs. the S&P 500.
After the interview, I immediately went to track down the clip to investigate further. In this CNBC segment dated March 17th, 2026, Carter Worth says:
“When you include dividends, the total return of the S&P 500 utilities sector matches the total return of the S&P 500. Think about all that work we’re all trying to do to figure out the market, and you could have just been in utilities the past 25, 26 years…”
For about five minutes I was a little shell-shocked by that statistic, especially considering everything we’ve been through in terms of technological buildout since 2000 — from broadband and Google igniting the internet age, to smartphones, social media, cloud computing, and streaming reshaping every corner of daily life. And now, with electric vehicles, 5G, and generative AI rewriting the rules of entire industries, the idea that the total return of Utilities matches — or even exceeds — the S&P 500 was rather disconcerting.
Since 2000, here were the total returns with dividends reinvested:
- Utilities (XLU): 710%
- Nasdaq 100 (QQQ): 661%
- S&P 500 (SPY): 613%
- Staples (XLP): 563%
- Real Estate (XLRE): 90%
Wow — he was right.
But wait just a second. He’s measuring from the 2000 high — right before technology stocks sold off 78%. Once I realized that, the foolish feeling disappeared pretty quickly.
So let’s run the same study, deploy just a small amount of discretionary portfolio management, and look at value/growth rotation and portfolio weighting at a highly obvious inflection point — say, the 2016 high in the Nasdaq Composite that finally eclipsed the pre-crash high from 2000. What would happen then?
Now it’s starting to make sense. Here are the total returns from November 2016 to today:
- Nasdaq 100 (QQQ): 436%
- S&P 500 (SPY): 260%
- Utilities (XLU): 152%
- Staples (XLP): 99%
- Real Estate (XLRE): 84%
The Nasdaq trounced Utilities’ return — 436% vs. 152% — while the S&P 500 beat Utilities as well, 260% vs. 152%.
To be fair to Carter, his point is still valid. If you had the choice to buy Technology stocks or Utility stocks in January 2000, just before the technology crash, you would have been better off in Utilities — letting the dividends reinvest and compound over time.
Utilities (XLU) (2000 – Today)
- Without dividends: 228%
- Total return – with dividends reinvested: 711%
Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) (2000 – Today)
- Without dividends: 542%
- Total return – with dividends reinvested: 660%
S&P 500 (SPY) (2000 – Today)
- Without dividends: 347%
- Total return – with dividends reinvested: 612%
That strategy works — but only if you’re capable and disciplined enough to buy a portfolio of stocks, not touch it for 26 years, and embrace what Einstein called the eighth wonder of the world: compounding. Let exponential growth do the heavy lifting.
Very few of our clients at Inside Edge Capital — myself included — are wired that way. The ability to buy, hold, and not touch a portfolio for two and a half decades is rare.
Speaking for myself and the majority of our clients, active management is our preferred style. Active management means knowing where to deploy capital as markets rotate between value and growth, between macro asset classes, and across sectors — all in pursuit of outperforming some underlying benchmark. It can be as straightforward as overweighting your portfolio into technology stocks following the 2016 breakout, a move that saw technology outperform utilities by 186.5% on a relative basis.
If this analysis resonates with you — if you know you’re not wired to buy, hold, and not touch a portfolio for 26 years — that’s exactly the kind of investor we built Inside Edge Capital for.
Before we ever deploy a single dollar into one of our portfolio models, we start with a comprehensive financial planning process led by our CFP, Kyle Wasson. Kyle works with each client to establish a clear picture of their full financial landscape — income, liabilities, tax situation, retirement timeline, and risk tolerance. That foundation is what allows us to deploy capital purposefully, not just reactively.
Once the planning work is done, Todd and the Inside Edge Capital team layer in active portfolio management — rotating between value and growth, across macro asset classes and sectors, and making tactical decisions like the 2016 Nasdaq overweight that beat utilities by 186.5% on a relative basis.
It’s financial planning meets active management. Two disciplines working together, built around how you actually think and behave as an investor.
Ready to get started? Visit us at InsideEdgeCapital.com to learn more or schedule a conversation with our team. We’d love to talk about where the opportunities are — and how to position your capital – right alongside ours – to take advantage of them.
— Todd Gordon, Founder, CIO, Inside Edge Capital, LLC
