July's Market Trends and Leaders

Market Trends and Leaders

Last month’s pattern continues as defensives such as Property companies (REITs), gold miners and utilities/ bond proxies have been the best performers over the last few weeks.Other leading groups are software companies and those with international exposure, or earning in foreign currencies that benefits from the falling Australian dollar.

Leading Sectors This Month

Metals and Mining +5.6%
Communications (Telcos) +5.4%
Health Care + 3.9%

Lagging Sectors this month

Information Technology -4.6%
Energy -4.2%
Consumer Staples (Grocers) -3.5%

The leaders and laggards are very similar to last months’ leaders and laggards – partly influenced by Tax-loss selling described above.

Segments this Month

In a complete reversal from last month’s rankings, but continuing the pattern we noted in the last few days of last month was the largest companies leading and the smallest lagging.

For a month where the market is up +2.4% the range was significant with:

Blue chips (Top 20) were up +3.6%,
Emerging Companies (smallest group) up +1%
Small caps were hte worst down – 0.3%

For the FY19:

Blue Chips + 9.12%

Mid caps flat for the year

Small caps down 0.45%

Emerging Companies -4.8%

The story of the small and mid caps is significantly different from the annuals figures above. As noted in the most interesting observation this month above, there has been an abnormally broad ranges of large gains and losses within the Australian Market.

Podcasts:

We regularly interview industry exports on numerous topics available in the Podcast playlist here.