April 2026 in returns

April was the month risk came back all at once, and unusually, it came back everywhere. The Nasdaq gained 15.3% and Japan's Nikkei 16.1%, with the Russell 2000 up 12.2%, the S&P 500 10.4%, the Dow 7.1% and Germany's DAX 7.1% — and this was no index illusion. Breadth was the broadest of the spring: 628 of 870 stocks (72%) and 138 of the 200 coins we track (69%) finished higher. Crypto joined rather than led, Bitcoin adding 11.8% and Ethereum 7.2% while Solana marked time at -0.1%. The tell was in what fell: with almost nothing else declining, the month's steepest drop belonged to volatility itself, the VIX down 33.1%.

The leadership was the AI-hardware complex in its first, most powerful leg. Intel more than doubled at +114.1%, with Credo (+85.4%), Astera Labs (+77.7%), AMD (+74.3%), Sandisk (+72.6%), Seagate (+72.0%) and Marvell (+66.8%) close behind — silicon, storage and the interconnect between them, bid as a single trade. What lagged was simply everything defensive or idiosyncratic: Charter (-23.5%), Tractor Supply (-22.5%), Insulet (-18.0%), Nike (-16.0%), ServiceNow (-15.5%) and Northrop Grumman (-15.1%). Read against what followed, April is where the whole arc began — Astera Labs, Sandisk and Marvell each ran further into May's melt-up, and each turned up on July's list of steepest decliners once memory costs and a firmer rates path caught up with them. Broad, cheap-volatility rallies feel like the safest kind while they last; this one was quietly building the concentration that would take three months to unwind.