Stock Market 2021 Roundup
We had the last week of 2021 as the trading week and, overall, the stock markets have been very good for the year. The only market that fared poorly are the Emerging Markets measured by EEM. Interestingly the S&P 500 returned better than the NASDAQ which is probably not a common phenomenon.
The small cap space was also a laggard in 2021 which shows that the smaller companies likely found it harder to cope with the effects of the pandemic.
Looking at individual sectors sorted by best returns for 2021
Quick observations:
The Top 10 of the 15 sectors I track closely performed better than the S&P 500 which was the best overall stock market in 2021.
The Top 5 sectors returned +40% or more.
Both Homebuilders and Energy, which had the best returns, are currently trending bearish.
The Biotech sector was consistently bad through the whole year. The Retail sector had all its gains at the beginning of the year and has been weak ever since.
For current overall trending, it is almost even with 8 bullish and 7 bearish.
The Top 5 sectors from a current trending and short-term perspective are
Interesting to see that Technology is not in the Top 5 current sectors.
I have read that most experts are saying that 2022 will not be as good for the markets as 2021 has been, I do not make predictions for the future so will play the markets as they develop.
Last week the returns for the major markets were:
S&P 500 +0.47%
Dow Jones +0.80%
NASDAQ +1.89%
Russell 2000 +0.17%
Emerging Markets +0.16%
Volatility Index -7.82%
So, all the major markets ended the year on a positive note and the VIX ended down to 17.22. This sets up positively for the first week of 2022.