7 healthcare stocks with growth of more than 30% year-to-date
Healthcare is the weakest sector of the S&P 500 this year. Yet, it harbors a group of stocks that have added tens of percent since January, and in one case, practically doubled its value. Their common denominator isn't any major hype but a return to margins and business where the market wrote them off in 2025. Which companies are they, what is driving their growth, and where do the risks lie?
Key points
The sector average says nothing about individual names this year. Healthcare is the weakest sector of the S&P 500, yet we find stocks with gains exceeding 100%.
The driver is not growth, but a return to margins from a low base. For firms with a net margin near zero, an improvement of costs by tenths of a percentage point can lead to a multiple-fold increase in earnings per share.
Regulation moves prices more than results. Court decisions, insurer reimbursement policies, and FDA dates had a greater impact this year than quarterly figures, often of a binary nature.
High appreciation is more of a warning. For some names, the price has exceeded analysts' target price, and part of this year's gain comes from one-off items.
A sector that lags behind, and stocks that are soaring
Sector statistics are merciless this year. The healthcare part of the S&P 500 has been moving roughly 4% below its level at the end of 2025 and ranked among the worst of the eleven sectors of the US market. The Health Care Select Sector SPDR fund $XLV, the most watched proxy for the entire industry, had a negative year-to-date return at the end of May, and its twelve-month performance also significantly lagged the broad market. The S&P 500, meanwhile, was showing gains of around 10.7% in mid-July.
But beneath the surface, something completely different is happening. While the biggest weights in the sector are stagnating or falling, a group of companies that the market wrote off in 2025 due to exploding healthcare costs, drug pricing pressure, or reimbursement uncertainty is undergoing a sharp revaluation this year. And these are not growth stories in the true sense of the word. This is a return to profitability from a very low base, which has historically been one of the strongest drivers of equity returns ever.
The reason is purely mathematical. If a company with huge revenues reports a net margin near zero, an improvement of a few tenths of a percentage point on the cost side is enough to multiply earnings per share several times over. That is exactly what is happening at US health insurers this year. A similar effect, albeit with different triggers, also applies to care providers, generic drug manufacturers, or diagnostic companies that have gained access to reimbursement from commercial payers.
In the following overview, we look at seven names that have added more than 30% since the start of the year. For each name, we examine not only what caused the growth but, more importantly, what could stop it.
Overview of names with more than 30% appreciation year-to-date
Ticker | Company | Focus | Price (USD) | Cap. (bn USD) | YTD |
DaVita | Dialysis centers | 230 | 17.1 | +105% | |
Moderna | mRNA vaccines and oncology | 57.7 | 22.7 | 95% | |
Jazz Pharmaceuticals | Rare diseases, oncology | 261 | 16.9 | 65% | |
Guardant Health | Liquid biopsies, screening | 160 | 21.4 | 65% | |
Centene | Medicaid and ACA exchanges | 64.7 | 31.6 | +53% | |
Humana | Medicare Advantage | 363.5 | 43.7 | +42% | |
Viatris | Generics and biosimilars | 17.7 | 20.7 | +42% |
Year-to-date appreciation in 2026 versus the market and sector
While the healthcare sector as a whole is nearly flat this year and the S&P 500 has added over 13%, these names are in a completely different league. The gap between the best and worst among them exceeds 60 percentage points. Even within this group of seven, they are not a homogeneous set.