A sector is a group of companies within the same industry such as Energy, Media or Banks. Each sector has an index, which is the sum of the prices of the stocks in that sector that have been weighted by how large each company is. On the Home page you will find a short list of the top performing sectors for the last 3 months.

Click on Indices in the Navigation and you will open the Indices page. This shows the performance of the different sector indices as a bar chart (the last 3 months).

In this example, the top bar shows that the Materials sector has increased in value by 16.16%. As this is a positive movement, it has a green bar to the right. Utilities on the other hand has fallen by 4.822% in the last three months, and has a red bar to the left. The benchmark is the Primary Market Index and this has risen by 7.67% in the last 3 months. Sectors higher than the Primary Market Index on this chart are outperforming the market, while sectors below the Primary Market Index are underperforming the market.

Sector analysis is an important part of stock selection as it is easier to pick a stock that is trending up if the sector is already trending up. In this market, it would be easier to identify a strong stock in the top 5 sectors than it would be in the sectors below the Primary Market Index.

The bottom half of this page also contains a table with the additional useful information.

A sector analysis is taken over a 3 month (or 90 day) period. But what happens if during that period the sector grows strongly, then becomes very bearish? The shares in that sector are now in a downtrend, but if the movement over the last 3 months is still positive, then this would be hard to see in the first bar graph. This problem however is solved with this table. The 60 day column is a measure of what happened in the first two months of the three month scan. The 90 day column is the result for the full 3 months. The difference between the two columns is what has happened in the last month.

With this in mind, you can see that Energy fell by nearly 3% in the first 2 months, but in the last 4 weeks has rebounded strongly to finish up 9.5% stronger for the full 3 months. In effect, this sector has gone from -3% to +9% in just 4 weeks.

Looking at Health Care. This sector performed strongly over the first 2 months, growing by 3.35%. However, in the last 4 weeks of the analysis the result fell to just 2.2%. Even though this sector has grown over the 3 months period, perhaps it is now in a downtrend.

In summary, you will want the 90 day performance to outperform the Primary Market Index figure. AND the 90 percentage growth should be higher than the 60 day percentage growth. This ensures that the sector is still trending upwards.

Once you have isolated a sector that is of interest, you can use the Indices page to bring up a Stock Scan page of only that sector. Each of the sector names of this page are are links.Click on the Materials heading. A Market Scan page for this sector will now appear.