If you’ve been fixated on the usual suspects in the S&P 500, you might be missing out on some solid action. Many mid-cap stocks have been delivering stellar gains in the first few weeks of this month, and there’s a good chance the momentum will stick around.
I believe they’ll prove to be more nimble than the large-cap stocks. It’s worth looking at them because they are comparatively trading at more attractive valuations and they also strike the sweet spot between the stability of large caps and the growth potential of small caps.
The S&P MidCap 400 index has outpaced the S&P 500 index year-to-date. It’s not just a flash in the pan, either. Historically, mid-caps have outperformed both their larger and smaller counterparts in 55% of rolling five-year periods since 1983. As such, it’s worth looking deeper into each top mid-cap performer.
I’ve screened the top mid-cap stocks trading in U.S. exchanges by their year-to-date gains.
A computer display with stock graphs revealing the performance of large-mid capitalization U.S. equities.
10. Nebius Group NV (NASDAQ:NBIS)
- YTD Performance: 18.1%
Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS) is primarily an AI-centric cloud platform. It offers GPUs as a service and has cloud infrastructure, along with developer tools for clients.
The company recently announced a strategic equity financing of USD 700 million, which was apparently oversubscribed (meaning more people wanted in than there were shares available). This money will likely fuel Nebius’s push to roll out its AI infrastructure around the globe faster than planned.
It has also been building GPU clusters in the U.S. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that NVIDIA itself is backing Nebius, which immediately puts it on a lot of investors’ radars. Their AI cloud business alone is tracking an annual run rate of $120 million, and 2025 revenue guidance is somewhere in the range of $750 million to $1 billion.
9. Hut 8 Corp (NASDAQ:HUT)
- YTD Performance: 23%
Hut 8 Corp (NASDAQ:HUT) mines Bitcoin (BTC-USD), so it’s pretty obvious why this company is on this list. Bitcoin is over $104,000 as of writing and there’s chatter on CNBC about it potentially doubling this year. I personally don’t think that’s going to happen, but you never know where market mania could carry this.
Regardless, it announced plans to upgrade its mining fleet in December and increase its Bitcoin mining capacity. It’s also working on a major project called Vega, a 205 MW facility set to come online in Q2 2025. It is also moving into AI computing power, though Bitcoin mining is still its main business by a long shot (about 60-70% of its revenue).
As with any investment in the crypto space, any investment here will be on the whims of Bitcoin’s erratic price action. As such, it’s very tough to gauge where HUT stock could be at the end of the year. The consensus price target is around $33.
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