HELENE MEISLER: Right, like JP Morgan has held up a lot better than a lot of the others. It had a much bigger rally, it went on to a higher high. So that chart, in general, looks so much different than the rest of the banks. You know, I also just want to say that most of what I'm seeing in the charts, as I went through the portfolio, is vastly different than to me what it looked like in May, or even in February, when we've looked at the portfolio the last couple of times.
And the big difference is that in May, almost all these stocks were down and out. OK, I mean, you looked at the portfolio, and the only stocks that were sort of up were some of the tech stocks. And at that, it was sort of the mega-cap tech stocks.
And so what's happened is that since-- and I remember all the questions were people complaining about this stock, that stock, the other stock, I mean, it was just nonstop whining about how poorly stocks were acting. And at the time, I said, I thought that was about to change, and I thought that we were going to start to get more money flowing into what I call the others.
And that's what's happened. And now, when I look at the portfolio, I don't see a lot of opportunity for buying. I see more opportunities where I would say, ooh, take some profits, because they've rallied so much. And so what I've been-- what I did when I went through the portfolio was I looked for names that were still down and out, which is more my style. But I look for names that were down and out, which if you think about it, may not be the greatest thing because it means they didn't participate so well. And they came down too much in August.
But to me, that's where I would look for opportunity.
SARA SILVERSTEIN: Yeah, but that's the point of the call, right? To have the conversation about the things where there's something to do, not to say, great job, Chris, on these things that really panned out. Even though they were down and out last time, we insisted on talking about them.
But to talk about that a little bit, because I'm sure a lot of members are noticing the same thing, and as we are-- as some of these have panned out a little bit, how do we feel about that? And Chris, let's start with you. How are you thinking about the names that have performed well as we go into the rest of the year?
CHRIS VERSACE: So there's really two things I think we have to do. One is take stock of which names have moved considerably. And we talked about that in last Friday's roundup when we recapped the month of August. Because to Helene's point, there were a number of positions, whether it was Deere, United Reynolds, Vulcan Materials, you know-- I'm trying to think what else, Marvell had a nice rebound, as well, Universal Display came back rather well. We saw some upward movement in Qualcomm, not demonstrative.
So what we want to do first is check the thesis, check the data. You know, I wrote a piece yesterday that outlined the second half, EPS expectations for a bunch of the companies, growing far faster than the S&P 500. Typically, when we see that, the argument-- kind of a trope of Wall Street-- is oh, faster earnings growth gives way to multiple expansion.
So I think we're set for some of that. But at the same time, we also have to recognize that when you see moves of 20, 30, perhaps even greater percentages, the prudent thing is to take some of those chips off the table. And I alluded to that this morning in some comments about the energy sector, oil, in particular, with our shares of XLE that have moved right around 20%.
And we've got some room upside to our price target around $98. But again, the prudent thing to do is probably to take some of those chips off the table, reinvest them elsewhere, maybe in some down and outs, maybe in a stock that we start to see the improving fundamentals. Maybe it's a Morgan Stanley, if the IPO market opens. But that's kind of the cycle that we want to do, is nurture profits, and redeploy and arguably plant seeds for what's next.