NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Despite their big-time bounce, stocks are still well below their 2000 lows, right? Depends on how you look at it.

If you are looking at the big indexes, yes, certainly. The Dow is back up above 10,000, but it's still more than 10 percent below its best level. The broader S&P 500 is more than 25 percent down from its 2000 high. The tech-swollen Nasdaq? Off nearly 60 percent.

Now let's cut things up a little differently, focusing on the S&P 500 since that's the benchmark most professional investors judge themselves against.

The index is market-capitalization weighted, meaning that General Electric, with stock worth about $322 billion, counts for around twice as much in the index's performance as IBM, which weighs in at $158 billion. In other words, the index is more indicative of how the biggest stocks in it have done than of how its component stocks have done generally.

Looking at the overall index you could hardly tell, as Banc of America Securities strategist Tom McManus points out, that two-thirds of the stocks in the S&P have had positive returns since the 2000 peak.

If we construct an index that gives all the stocks currently in the S&P an equal weighting and look at how they performed since Mar. 24, 2000 -- the day the S&P peaked -- we find that it's climbed 32 percent. Add in dividends and the return is even better than that.

On a sector level, too, things aren't quite so bad as they appear if we focus on the S&P's overall performance. Energy's up 7.6 percent, consumer staples are up 32.5 percent, financials are up 14.5 percent, health care is up 9.8 percent and basic materials are up 19.9 percent from March 24, 2000. Industrials are down 7.7 percent and consumer cyclicals are down 12.8 percent. Utilities (thanks to Enron effects) are down 20.1 percent.

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Techs are down 65 percent. Telecommunication stocks are down 63.6 percent.

So maybe the way to think of this is that the stock market really has recovered already, and that it's just the disruptive effects of a busted bubble in big tech and telco issues that make people think there's still more bounce left. Or, as McManus puts it, the easy gains have already been made.