Goldman Sachs warns S&P 500 market breadth hits lowest since dot-com bubble

The S&P 500 is having a perfectly fine year on paper. It’s up 14% in 2026 and sitting within roughly 1% of its August peak. But underneath that glossy surface, something uncomfortable is happening: the typical stock in the index is getting quietly destroyed. Goldman Sachs strategists, led by Ben Snider, flagged in a late September client note that market breadth in the S&P 500 has narrowed to levels not seen since the dot-com bubble. The median stock in the index is trading 16% below its 52-week high, even as the headline number looks healthy. The numbers paint a stark picture Goldman’s U.S. Equity Sentiment Indicator has fallen to -0.9, matching the low watermark hit back in March 2026. The forward price-to-earnings ratio for the S&P 500 has slid from 22x to 19x, landing right on the ten-year average. Fewer than half of S&P 500 constituents are currently trading above their 200-day moving averages. Historical analysis shows that instances of the index nearing all-time highs while sub-50% of stocks sit above their 200-day averages have been rare since 1990. The handful of times it has happened clustered almost entirely between 1998 and 2000. A warning months in the ...