Sectors
The S&P 500 is eleven sectors in a trenchcoat. "The market is up" can mean everything rose together, or that technology carried a tape where most sectors fell. Those are different markets and they call for different decisions. The daily read on which is happening sits on our free Markets hub.
Click any sector to hide it. Total return including dividends, from Yahoo Finance daily closes. Chart by Lightweight Charts.
All eleven sectors and the S&P 500 over one year, every line normalized to percentage change so they start together at zero and can be compared directly. Click a name in the legend to hide it — with twelve lines drawn, isolating three or four is usually how you get an answer out of it.
The question worth asking is not which line ends highest. It is how many finish above the S&P 500 line. When only one or two do, the index's gain belongs to a handful of companies and "the market went up" is describing something much narrower than it sounds.
A sector leading over three months and a sector leading over ten years are telling you completely different things. The first is rotation, and it reverses. The second is structural, and it is most of what determines a long-term outcome. Reading them side by side is the point of this table.
Withdrawn. This showed sector total returns across six horizons. It came from a source whose licence does not permit us to republish it, so we took it down rather than publish a number we cannot show a right to publish. We would rather have a gap here than a figure we cannot stand behind. The rest of this page runs on public-domain government data and is unchanged.
Do the subtraction. Find the S&P 500 row at the bottom of the table, pick a column, and take the index number away from the sector number. That gap — in percentage points — is the entire result of having chosen a sector instead of just buying the index. If Technology shows +34% over one year and the S&P shows +17%, technology beat the index by 17 points. If Consumer Discretionary shows +1% in that same year, it trailed by 16.
Trailing the index is not the same as losing money, and it is worth being precise about that. A sector up 1% in a year the index rose 17% still made you 1% — you did not lose anything. What you gave up is the extra 16 points you would have had by owning the whole market and thinking about it less. That is a real cost, but it is a cost of opportunity, not a loss, and treating the two as identical is how people talk themselves into selling something that is working perfectly well.
Do that subtraction across all six columns before drawing any conclusion. A sector ahead of the index over three months and behind it over five years has told you something quite different from one that is ahead in every column, and the second is far rarer than people expect. For most people, most of the time, the honest reading of this table is that the index row was hard to beat and picking between the rows was not worth the effort.
Be careful with the ten-year column in particular. It covers one specific decade with one specific interest-rate regime, and the sector at the top of it is there partly because money was cheap for most of that period. A ten-year return is evidence about the past, not a forecast, and the sectors that led the 2010s were not the ones that led the 2000s.
Market data provided by TradingView and may be delayed. Shown for educational purposes only — nothing on this page is investment advice, and past performance doesn't guarantee future results.
The table tells you what happened. It does not tell you why, and the why is mostly three things: interest rates, where the economy sits in its cycle, and where earnings growth is expected rather than where it currently is.
Rates do the heaviest lifting. Utilities and Real Estate tend to struggle when rates rise, and it is worth being precise about the mechanism: it is largely a valuation effect rather than a business one. Nothing about the underlying company changed — the rate used to discount its future cash flows did. Sectors whose value sits furthest in the future feel that most, which is why high-growth technology and rate-sensitive income sectors can fall together for what looks like opposite reasons.
The cycle does the rest. Cyclical sectors — Industrials, Consumer Discretionary, Materials — depend on people and businesses spending freely, so they tend to lead early in an expansion and suffer first when demand cools. Defensives such as Consumer Staples, Health Care and Utilities sell things people buy regardless, so their earnings hold up better late in a cycle and in downturns. That maps directly onto demand elasticity: how much a business's sales fall when money gets tight.
None of this is a timing system, and it would be dishonest to present it as one. The patterns are loose, the exceptions are numerous, and identifying which stage of a cycle you are in is dramatically easier afterwards than at the time. What it is good for is understanding — knowing why a sector is moving stops you attributing it to something that is not happening. The economic data behind all of it is on our free Economics page, and the full treatment is Economics for Traders.
Technology, Health Care, Financials, Consumer Discretionary, Communication Services, Industrials, Consumer Staples, Energy, Utilities, Real Estate and Materials. Every company in the index sits in exactly one.
Subtract the S&P 500 row from the sector row, in the column you care about. That gap in percentage points is the whole result of choosing that sector over the index. Check all six columns before concluding anything.
No. A sector up 1% while the index rose 17% still made you 1%. What you gave up is the extra 16 points — opportunity cost, not loss. Confusing the two makes people quit at the worst time.
It covers one decade under one interest-rate regime. Whatever sits at the top is there partly because money was cheap for most of it. That is a description of conditions already past, not a forecast.
Mostly rates, the stage of the economic cycle, and expected rather than current earnings growth. The patterns are real but loose — useful for understanding, unreliable for timing.
Sector comparison is part of the free Markets hub — economic data, earnings, news and sector performance, refreshed daily.