Leadership Trends Among Developed World Sectors

Regional leadership trends have changed recently in the global equity market.  So far this year, in USD terms, Developed Asia-Pacific is the best performing region in the developed world, with Europe second and North America last.  In the following tables we show regional performance by sector.  We equal weight all the stocks in the sectors and region to remove market-cap related distortions.  

MSCI Asia-Pacific

Driven by Japan, Asia-Pacific health care and consumer staples have been the two best performing sectors this year.  There are four sectors in Asia-Pacific that have outperformed the best performing sector in Europe. 

MSCI Europe

While consumer discretionary has led in Europe, Asian consumer discretionary stocks have actually performed better.

MSCI North America

Health care continues to lead market performance in the US and is actually the only North American sector to outperform the MSCI World index YTD.

Turning to aggregate developed world performance, we can see that leadership is still in the growth counter-cyclical health care and consumer staple groups.  Among the cyclical sectors, consumer discretionary and technology are the only two that are outperforming the MSCI World Index. 

MSCI World