From the desk of Willie Delwiche.
Key Takeaway:
- Yields pause, but trends are still higher.
- Sector leadership is providing little support for the indexes.
- New lows collapse but new highs are scarce.
Sector level trends reveal the challenge for the indexes at this point. Energy and Utilities are the only sectors in longer-term up-trends at this point. Even if we expand strength to include the Materials sector (which with the other two are seeing strong trends in our shorter-term price, momentum, breadth model), we are only talking about 10% of the overall S&P 500.
To put it another way: even after the 60+% rally in XLE (Energy ETF) this year and broad weakness elsewhere, there are still three individual companies (AAPL, MSFT, GOOGL) with a larger market capitalization than the entire S&P 500 energy sector. The craziest stat in this regard may be the comparison between Energy and TSLA. Pre-COVID, Tesla’s market capitalization was ~5% of the entire Energy sector. It peaked above 120% last year and even after this year’s moves is still at 50%.
