The Median Stock Is Unchanged Over The Last Year But Sector Allocation Makes A Difference

As we noted yesterday, the US stock market has been the only game in town recently. The S&P 500 is up about 8% over the year and the median stock in the MSCI North America is up 7%. Meanwhile the median stock in the MSCI World Index has not changed over the past year.





However, breaking the MSCI World into sectors we see that performance has been pretty uneven over the past year. Energy, unsurprisingly, has vastly underperformed. The median energy stock is firmly in a bear market down over 28% over the past year. On the other end of the performance spectrum, readers of this blog will not be surprised to see that the median stock in the health care sector is higher by 17% over the past year.





Median performance for the remaining sectors separates fairly cleanly among couter-cyclicals and cyclicals. The median stock in the utilities sector is 14% higher than it was a year ago. And the median stock in the consumer staples sector is up 9%. Telecom is up 1%.







Tech is the only sector where the median stock higher over the past year (5%, respectively). The median stock in the consumer discretionary sector is unchanged. The remaining cyclical sectors are all down between 2% and 7% over the past year.