Growth Defensive Sectors Outperforming With Broad Participation

For the last last month, the MSCI World consumer staples and health care sectors have taken the lead. Of the counter-cyclical sectors, these are the two "growth defensive" sectors while telecom and utilities are more "income defensives".

Performance in these growth defensive sectors has been very broad.  We calculate the percentage of stocks in each sector that are up in price and down in price over various time periods.  In both the consumer staples and health care sectors, over the last month, 72% of the stocks have been up while only 28% were down.

This gives us a net reading of 44% for each sector.