Sector Trends - What are They?

Sector Trends is another tool for the trader's tool box. The market consist of an interconnected tree of stocks. At the highest level are the general markets such as the SMI and the SPI. Within the SPI, there are sectors. For example, there is the Financial and Energy sectors. There is also the Health Care and Utilities as well as others and under these sectors are the stocks.

Sector Trends tool allows you to drill down to any level within this tree structure that you wish to investigate and to visually see the current "Qualified Trends" at that level.  Sector Trends provides a trader with a fast and easy way to accomplish sector analysis as part of qualified trends. Here's a short video that describes the tool followed by additional detailed commentary.

When entering the sector trends tools, you'll see the qualified trends for the general market and the nine major sectors as shown below.

To use the tool to its fullest extent however, you will want to drill down. You can do this in two ways as described in the video - simply clicking on any of the major sectors to reveal all stocks in that sector or by entering a particular stock to find the sector it is in and all other stocks in the same sector.

To carry this a bit father, here are a few examples to get your mind going:

  • You see a stock that has fallen or risen precipitously on earnings announcement and you want to quickly locate all other stocks that may benefit or be hurt as a result.
  • You see that the market is beginning to rotate between sectors and want to determine which sector is likely to see money flows soon.

Don't forget that that all columns can be sorted by clicking on the header row of your choice to easily group strong and weak stocks in a given sector.