S&P500 Sector Trivia

By Barry Ritholtz - January 26th, 2010, 12:36PM

I’ve been meaning to share this with you, and having David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff on Bloomberg Surveillance this morning reminded me:

Have a look at the table of S&P 500 sectors — the only one that has outperformed in each of the past three decades is health care. No, Medical and pharmacy inflation was not in your imagination.

Telecom services is the only sector to underperform in all three decades.
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Category: Markets.

Comments

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

7 Responses to “S&P500 Sector Trivia”

tCA Says:
January 26th, 2010 at 1:21 pm
Somewhat surprisingly Consumer Discretionary almost did what Health Care did in terms of the outperformance in up and down markets. With the exception of 1% underperformance in the 90′s, it was right there. As a highly qualified arm chair analyst, I’m surprised there wasn’t an outperformance in the ’90′s and underperformance in the Aughts. It would be interesting to roll these decades forward by about 2 years. Basically, start it at the beginning of the 20-yr bull and have it end in 2011. What do you think would change the most?
Bokolis Says:
January 26th, 2010 at 1:32 pm
Neither is the divergence between the prices of raw materials and the prices of finished goods.
bman Says:
January 26th, 2010 at 2:23 pm
Is this some kind of diversionary topic? The bad guys went thataways…

At least doctors and hospitals provide some type of value for what you pay.

Insurance and bankers on the other hand are just a bunch of gamblers that take your money and play with it.
cognos Says:
January 26th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
bman – Last I checked, you can do what you want with your own money. You can “bank” at Merrill Lynch or Etrade and play with it yourself. Or you can keep it in cash, gold, small business, etc. Accounts are FDIC insured and investment account are also insured by a securities association.

Lots of people “played” with there own money in real estate… didnt take a banker to wipe them out. They did it themselves (with borrowed money from the bank!).

Its easy to blame someone else.
bman Says:
January 26th, 2010 at 3:49 pm
@Cognos, I’ll blame the bankers and insurers whether it’s easy or not, as well as whether it was there money or their money. A crook is a crook.
Long Term Sector Performance | Contrarian Musings Says:
January 27th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
[...] What’s the only sector to outpeform the S&P 500 in each of the last three decades? From Glusking Sheff via The Big Picture [...]
Wednesday links: zero yields Abnormal Returns Says:
January 27th, 2010 at 12:49 pm
[...] 500 sector performance over the past three decades. (Big Picture, EconomPic [...]