Sectors
Earnings Talk: Tech Rules, What’s on Tap This Week
You’ll see a noticeable change in the length of the earnings calendars from this point on, indicating we’re now past the heart of earnings season. There are still some game-changers in the lineup though.
As for how the market fared so far (with 80% of companies reporting), about 67% of companies topped their EPS estimates, and [...]
Sector & Industry Stack-Up… Makes Sense, But Look at Bigger Picture
After a multi-week slump, financial stocks finally took off and led last week’s gains. Given how badly they’d underperformed since mid-September, any marketwide bullish tide should continue to prove very fruitful for the group.
On the losing end of the spectrum were health care stocks, though they still ended the week with a small gain.
Sector Rank
Here’s [...]
Economic Barrage Slowing Down, Damage Done
There’s too much data from last week to look at all of it; we’ll just hit the highlights, starting with personal income and personal spending. The former was down 0.1% for September, while the latter was up 0.2%. Correspondingly, consumer credit levels were up by $2.1 billion…. the first increase in many, many months. Back [...]
Reality Check: What’s Really Wrong With Homebuilder Stocks?
After yet-another disappointing building permits and housing starts update on Tuesday of this week, we were inundated with yet-another salvo of news commentaries stating the obvious…. with headlines such as Home Builders Continue to Struggle…”, and “Housing Starts Still Weak”. Fair enough.
The most amusingly-obvious (yet also irritating) story came from U.S. News & World Report [...]
New Sector Leader, Old Leaders Still Near the Head of the Pack
It was a wild week last week on the sector front, with some new contestants starting to jockey for leaedership roles (and some of them are even making progress to that end).
Utilities and telecom are still out on front, though utilities stocks eased back a bit later in the week, allowing telecom to move ahead [...]
Sector, Style Groups Leave No Ambiguity - Clear Leaders Emerging
For the second week in a row we saw materials and industrial stocks lead the way, with transportation stocks (thanks to stellar results from a few railroad and trucking names) not far behind. At the bottom of the pile was healthcare - again - with gold just one notch above the bottom rung.
While a rally [...]
Investment-Worthy Trend: Road and Rail Proves All It Needs To
Are you one of the folks who thinks the economy is slowing down? Not that there’s not some evidence to that end, but to be fair, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. One such piece of evidence is railroad freight activity in the United States (as well as in Canada).
In June, the total rail [...]
Nowhere to Hide at Sector Level, Though Some Industries Offered Some Shelter
Guess where the only place to hide last week was? No surprise here…. gold stocks continued their march. Once again though, gold is now going higher simply because it’s going higher - and that’s a rug waiting to be pulled out form underneath it. Energy was the big loser all week long, but the big [...]
(Almost) Nowhere to Hide - Sector, Industry Trends Alarming
Sector Performance
There was nowhere to hide last week - all the sectors and groups were down. The ‘least bad’ was gold and technology, while basic materials and transportation took the biggest hits.
Sector Rank
Industry Performance
There were a few safe havens for those who drilled down into industry-level data. Healthcare and food did particularly well, which makes [...]
Wake Up and Smell the Leaders - Style, Sector Biases Remain Unchanged
You can slice it however you want to - it’s not going to change the fact that small caps have been, and continue to be, the market’s best thing going. That’s not to say they’re bulletproof from another pullback, because they’re not. They have been the first and best to recover from the May implosion [...]
