There are many different sectors to look at when investing and building a portfolio, all you have to do is look around your own house. Right away you will see the different sectors. Take the consumer discretionary and the consumer non-discretionary items in your home. Most if not all of those companies are traded in the stock market.
Sectors
Look at the consumer discretionary and the consumer non-discretionary (also called consumer staples) in your home. Within each sector there are sub-sectors or sub-industries. For example in the consumer staples sector, look at toilet paper, toothpaste, shampoo and soap, look at the company names on these items.
Now look around your home for the consumer discretionary items you own, the computer and all the peripherals, television, Internet service, cable or satellite, new shoes, did you go out to eat or order a pizza.
Anything that you bought that you didn’t have to buy is pretty much consumer discretionary. As you look around your home and work place, you can probably see some company that represents every one of the following sectors.
Some places will divide the sub-categories slightly different.
- Consumer non-discretionary: These companies sell products that consumers need to buy. Like toilet paper, toothpaste, tissues, laundry soap, dish soap, shampoo and aspirin. The sub industries would be grocery stores, drug retail, food distributors, household and personal products and soft drinks.
- Consumer discretionary: Clothes, apparel, shoes, cable, computers, electronics, Internet, restaurant, gambling and casinos, department stores, home improvement stores, furniture, movie and entertainment and leisure products.
- Energy: This includes all the oil producers and drillers and including natural gas and coal.
- Financials: This includes all types of banks and REIT (real estate investment trust). Also included are all types of insurance and mortgage lenders.
- Health Care: Managed health care, biotech, pharmaceuticals and health care supplies.
- Industrial Sector, is a very broad sector. Some of them are the aerospace, defense, airlines, construction, highways and railroads, machinery, ports, office supplies and trucking.
- Information technology: This includes communications equipment, computer hardware, storage and peripherals, data processing, home entertainment software, IT, business software and semiconductors.
- Materials: Another very broad sector that includes the chemicals, construction materials, metals and mining, forest products such as paper products, metal and glass containers, steel and precious metals and mining.
- Telecommunication services: Such as alternative carriers and wireless companies.
- Utilities: This sector encompasses gas distributors, electricity providers, water utilities, and alternative energy companies.
- Real Estate: This sector includes real estate investment trusts (REITs) and real estate development companies.
These sectors are very broad and wide-ranging and your choices for investing in these sectors and industries are just as varied.
Why Sector Investing
Sector investing is investing in certain sectors and industries. You would have a portfolio of a sector or sectors that you feel strong enough about to invest in.
One reason to invest in sectors is to be in the right industries at the right time of the economic cycle. If you can pick the right sector(s) as they are about to start moving back up, then you can increase your profits of your overall portfolio. With the new president about to take office and his talk of rebuilding America, the thought of infrastructure and materials and construction industries comes to mind.
Another reason to invest in sectors is to be diversified. Spread your investments among numerous industries. By being diversified in several different sectors, you can spread your risk out and hopefully be in more up sectors than down.
Sector Investing Helps Diversification
For example, if you had been invested in the precious metal mining industry during the early and mid part of 2008, and at the same time invested in the homebuilding industry. Your mining investments could have been better then the homebuilding companies were bad. So your mining investments would have saved your portfolio from losing a great deal of money from the homebuilding stocks.
Trying to pick one sector over another can work at times, as in sector rotation, but you would have to always have good timing to know when to sell this sector and move onto the next one.
Another risk is to always follow the hot sector, you keep reading about gold and silver and copper going up, up and you decide to put a lot of your money into that one sector. By the time you invest, you might have missed the majority of the upward move of the mining stocks and they were already heading down. Chasing the hot sector or the hot stock for the individual investor hardly seems to work out. That is why diversifying works.
Timing and the Economic Cycle
Right now in late 2008, do you feel that the oil sector has bottomed and that it will start heading up again, Maybe you feel the homebuilding or the financial sectors have bottomed finally, and now is the time to invest in those sectors.
By timing these sectors and the economic cycles and moving out of one sector into another is called sector rotation. You time these moves right by paying attention to all of the news and charting each sector. By investing in several different sectors at a time and being diversified you could limit your losses if you made a mistake in one sector.
Stocks, ETFs and Mutual Funds
You can look at each sector and industry and choose certain stocks in each that you would want to invest in, or you could invest in Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) for a sector. ETFs are a good way to invest in a certain sector and be diversified in that sector at the same time. There are also mutual funds that are sector specific as well.
If you pick just a couple of stocks in one sector, you could be right about the sector, but wrong about the stocks you picked and still lose money. With ETFs you would have many companies in the right sector and maybe 2 out of 10 companies didn’t do well, you would still come out ahead being in the right sector.
Sector ETFs
A few sector ETFs that have been performing well in 2013 include:
- XLU: The Select Sector SPDR Utility
- IYT: iShares Transportation Average
- XLV: The Select Sector SPDR Health Care
- XLE: The Select Sector SPDR Energy
- XLB: The Select Sector SPDR Materials
- XLY: The Select Sector SPDR Consumer Discretionary
- XRT: The SPDR Retail
- XOP: The SPDR Oil and Gas Exploration
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