In June, 86% of the energy stocks in the MSCI World Index had positive price performance year-to-date. Since that time, however, energy stocks have been clobbered. In mid-October, only 11% of energy stocks were higher YTD. This has marginally improved to 28% as of yesterday. Overall, however, energy stocks remain the worst performing sector by a wide margin in 2014.
MSCI World Index
Broadening out our perspective, we see that 55% of all MSCI World Stocks are higher this year as the index is up 2.96% from an equal-weighted perspective. The current percentage of stocks with positive price performance is below the high for the year which was 70% in early July.
Not surprisingly as it is by far the best performing sector year-to-day, the health care sector has the most stocks with positive performance this year at 83%. 72% of utility stocks are higher and 67% of information technology stocks are higher year-to-date.