Skip to main content

Investors Are Becoming More Discriminating



Trade tensions escalated as the U.S. administration expanded tariffs on Chinese goods last week. You wouldn’t have known by watching the performance of benchmark indices, though. Just four of the 25 national stock market indices tracked by Barron’s – Australia, Italy, Spain, and Mexico – moved lower.

However, if you look a little deeper into the performance of various market sectors, you discover an important fact: The market tide wasn’t lifting all stocks.

It has been said a rising tide lifts all boats. When translated into stock-market speak, the saying becomes, ‘A rising market tide lifts all stocks.’ In other words, when the market moves higher, stocks tend to move higher, too. That wasn’t the case last week.

Barron’s reported investors have become more selective:

“We went from a market where everything moved largely together to one where sector fundamentals began to matter more than where the S&P 500 was going...At the sector level, it’s apparent that no one has been ignoring tariffs. While the S&P 500 has gained 1.7 percent over the past month of trading, industrials and materials have dropped 2.5 percent, while financials have slumped 2.9 percent, hit by a double whammy of trade fears and a flattening yield curve. Utilities and consumer staples have outperformed, gaining 8.1 percent and 3.5 percent, respectively.”

Utilities and Consumer Staples are considered to be non-cyclical or defensive sectors of the market because they are not highly correlated with the business cycle.

Defensive companies tend to perform consistently whether a country’s economy is expanding or in recession. For example, a household’s need for power, soap, and food doesn’t disappear during a recession. As a result, the revenues, earnings, and cash flows of defensive companies remain relatively stable in various economic conditions.

In addition, the share prices of these companies tend to be less susceptible to changing economic conditions. Defensive stocks tend to outperform the broader market during periods of recession and underperform it during periods of expansion.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Womack Weekly Commentary: September 18, 2017

­Womack Weekly Commentary September 18, 2017 The Markets “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.” Yogi Berra was talking about baseball, but the concept also applies to diversification, according to the GMO White Paper, The S&P 500: Just Say No . From the title, you might think the authors – Matt Kadnar and James Montier – don’t like U.S. stocks. They do: “Being a U.S. equity investor over the past several years has felt glorious. The S&P 500 has trounced the competition provided by other major developed and emerging equity markets. Over the last 7 years, the S&P is up 173 percent (15 percent annualized in nominal terms) versus MSCI EAFE (in USD terms), which is up 71 percent (8 percent annualized), and poor MSCI Emerging, which is up only 30 percent (4 percent annualized). Every dollar invested in the S&P has compounded into $2.72 versus MSCI EAFE’s $1.70 and MSCI Emerging’s $1.30.” The au...
9 comments
Read more

Inventions That Make Life a Little Easier

  necessity is the mother of invention… Businesses have been finding innovative solutions to labor issues forever. For example, dogs were once bred to cook, according to Popular Science’s podcast, The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week .   When people relied on fire to roast meat, the spit was an invaluable tool. However, turning a spit for hours wasn’t a popular job, so dogs were bred and trained to turn spits. “The first mention of the turnspit dog…was in 1576…The long story short here is that people bred terrier-like dogs to…fit easily into these treadmills that powered various kitchen aids, but primarily the roasting spit.”   By some accounts, the poor working conditions of turnspit dogs in New York hotels contributed to the founding of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).   Today, pandemic labor shortages have sparked innovation. Companies that are having difficulty finding workers are adopting technological solutions. F...
1 comment
Read more

Pulling the Economy Out of the Shed

  Pulling the economy out of the shed. If you’ve ever stored tools or machinery in a shed or garage for an extended period of time, you know they often need some care and repair to function properly. The same appears to be true of the pandemic economy. Economic growth in the United States is on the rebound. The latest report shows real gross domestic product, which is the value of all goods and services produced in our country, was up 6.4 percent annualized during the first quarter of 2021, an improvement from 4.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020. Also, pandemic restrictions have been lifted. Americans have begun to spend more and save less, and there is high demand for goods and services. The economy appears to be primed for stronger growth, but there are some glitches in the system – namely labor and supply chains. For the second month in a row, the May U.S. employment report showed fewer jobs gains than anticipated, although the unemployment rate dropped from 6.1 pe...
Post a Comment
Read more