These 20 stocks were the biggest losers of 2022

First, here’s how the 11 sectors of the benchmark index performed for the year:

S&P 500 sector	2022 price change	Forward P/E	Forward P/E as of Dec. 31, 2021
Energy	59.0%	9.7	11.1
Utilities	-1.4%	18.9	20.4
Consumer Staples	-3.2%	21.0	21.8
Health Care	-3.6%	17.6	17.2
Industrials	-7.1%	18.3	20.8
Financials	-12.4%	11.9	14.6
Materials	-14.1%	15.8	16.6
Real Estate	-28.4%	16.5	24.2
Information Technology	-28.9%	20.1	28.1
Consumer Discretionary	-37.6%	21.3	33.2
Communication Services	-40.4%	14.3	20.8
S&P 500	-19.4%	16.8	21.4
Source: FactSet

The energy sector was the only one to show a gain in 2022, and it was a whopper, even as West Texas Intermediate crude oil
CL.1,
+2.69%
gave up most of its gains from earlier in the year. Here’s why investors are still confident in the supply/demand setup for oil and energy stocks.

Looking at the worst-performing sectors, you might wonder why the consumer discretionary and communication services sectors fared worse than information-technology, the core tech sector. One reason is that S&P Dow Jones Indices can surprise investors with its sector choices. The consumer discretionary sector includes Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
+1.12%
and Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN,
-0.21%,
which has fallen nearly 50% this year. The communications sector includes Meta Platforms Inc.
META,
+0.07%,
along with Match Group Inc.
MTCH,
+0.97%,
which is down 69% for 2022, and Netflix Inc.
NFLX,
+1.29%,
which is down 51% this year.

There were many reasons easy to cite for Big Tech’s decline, such as a questionable change in strategy for Facebook’s holding company, Meta, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg has put so much of the company’s resources into developing a new world that most people don’t wish to enter, at least yet. Meta’s shares were down 64% for 2022.

You might also blame the Twitter-related antics and sales of Tesla shares by CEO Elon Musk for the 65% decline in the electric-vehicle maker’s stock during 2022. But Tesla had a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 120.3 at the end of 2021, while the S&P 500
SPX,
-0.25%
traded for 21.4 times its weighted forward earnings estimate, according to FactSet. Those P/E ratios have now declined to 22.1 and 16.8, respectively. So Tesla no longer appears to be a very expensive stock, especially for a company that increased its vehicle deliveries by 42% in the third quarter from a year earlier.

Analysts polled by FactSet expect Tesla’s stock to double during 2023. It nearly made this list of 20 EV stocks expected to rebound the most in 2023.

The worst-performing S&P 500 stocks of 2022

Here are the 20 stocks in the S&P 500 that fell the most for 2022.

Click on the tickers for more information about the companies.

Click here for Tomi Kilgore’s detailed guide to the wealth of information available for free on the MarketWatch quote page.

Another way of measuring the biggest stock-market losers of 2022

It is one thing to have a large decline based on the share price, but that doesn’t tell the entire story. How much of a decline did investors see in the holdings of their shares during the year? The S&P 500’s total market capitalization declined to $32.21 trillion as of Dec. 29 (the most recent figure available) from $40.36 trillion at the end of 2021, according to FactSet.

Shareholders of these companies suffered the largest declines in market cap during 2022.

So there is your surprise for today: Apple is this year’s biggest stock-market loser.

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