Wednesday, August 06, 2014

What's Down in a Bull Market?

This useful graphic from FinViz illustrates the variability of performance among U.S. stock market sectors thus far this year.  If you owned stocks in the basic materials, healthcare, or utilities sectors, you're sporting gains in the vicinity of 9% this year.  If you owned technology and consumer goods shares, your gains are a bit less than half that.  If you owned stocks in the industrial sector, you're down on the order of 3.5%.

Indeed, here are sector and index ETFs that, as of Wednesday's close, are down for 2014:

KRE - regional banking stocks
XRT - retail stocks
XLY - consumer discretionary stocks
XLI - industrial stocks
IWM - Russell 2000 stocks
IJR - Standard and Poor's 600 small cap stocks
IWC - Russell microcap stocks
XHB - housing stocks
VGK - European stocks
EFA - Europe, Asia, and Far East stocks
DBC - commodities
EWJ - Japan stocks

That's a pretty good chunk of the equity world.  The tide of central bank liquidity has lifted many boats this year, but not all of them.

Further Reading:   A Bit of Perspective
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