We've been looking a lot recently at all the market divergences that are present today ranging from
lack of new highs, to
weakness in copper and
lumber, to
the average stock being more than 10% from it's recent high. So in the spirit of divergences we thought we'd point out one more, that being the fact that the number of companies outperforming the World Index over the last 200 days has fallen from 57% in May of 2013 to as low as 45% recently. This behavior is another indicator signaling deteriorating participation of individual stocks even though indices are near their all-time highs.
When we dig into the details on a regional level we notice that only 24% of MSCI Pacific stocks have outperformed over the last 200 days, while 70% of MSCI Europe stocks have outperformed over the period.
Digging even deeper into the underperformance of MSCI Pacific stocks, we point out that only 18% of Japanese stocks have outperformed over the last 200 days and no individual sector has seen outperformance by more than 50% of its constituents.
MSCI Japan:
But in Europe only the Consumer Staples sector has seen less than 50% of its members outperform.
MSCI Europe:
