As if picking stocks wasn’t tough enough already. This means stocks’ returns varied greatly from one another, even when the overall market looked positive. With elevated single-stock dispersion and narrower breadth compared to 2023-2024, picking individual stocks, proved more challenging than in recent years. For most people, passive indexing or sector ETFs (exchange-traded funds) likely outperformed active stock picking amid all this volatility. With splits this extreme, headline market returns can be misleading.