Finding Top Performing Sectors

It is easier to swim with the current rather than against it. Similarly, when selecting stocks or ETFs for investment, finding investments in strong sectors vs. weak sectors will likely yield better returns. Fortunately, finding the strongest sectors is easy in Stock Rover. There are a number of ways to do it. Let’s look at three.

Markets

The first, simplest and quickest way is to select Markets from the Start Menu and focus on the Sector table as highlighted below. For momentum purpose, it is best to select the one month or the three month performance. Clicking on the return column, sorts the sectors by return.

Table

The next approach uses the power of the Stock Rover Table. The recipe is as follows:

1. Select World from the Start Menu
2. Select Table as the Layout
3. Select Sectors from the Navigation Panel
4. Select Returns vs S&P 500 from the Price Performance View Folder

The three month return is highlighted in the screenshot above (5.). Clicking on any of the column headers will sort on that column. The first click will sort in ascending order, subsequent clicks invert the order.

Chart

The third approach is to chart the sectors. We begin by using a watchlist with the investable sector ETFs. To do this, we…

1. Select Watchlist from the Start Menu
2. Select Chart as the Layout
3. Select Sectors ETFs from the Default Watchlist folder
4. Select a 1 year period for the chart

Now to get all the sector tickers into the chart, we…

5. Click on the first ETF (IYZ)
6. Shift Click on the last ETF (XLY)
7. Right Click on XLY and select Chart

And we get this…

To make the chart more informative, we…

1. Add SPY to the Compare to box to include the S&P 500 performance
2. Click on the SPY ticker in the chart to it to flatline it

In the chart below we can now see the sector performance of each sector relative to the S&P 500. It is clear that Technology has been the clear winner over the last year.