Periodic Table Performance Returns 2007- 1st Half 2018

Comments

• msf

  September 2018

  Normally when I see these tables, I just go ooohh, look at the pretty pictures.
  
  But when there's coloring outside the lines, I take a closer look. The S&P 500 sector performance table shows eleven rows of sectors (plus a row for the S&P 500). The problem is that until 2016 there were only ten sectors.
  
  This is how the chart looked through 2015.
  http://www.usfunds.com/media/files/pdfs/researchreports/2016/Periodic-Table-of-Sector-Returns-2016.pdf
  
  
  
  
  Here's State Street Global Advisors (SPDRs) current chart, with 10 sectors through 2015, and eleven sectors since.
  http://www.sectorspdr.com/sectorspdr/Pdf/All Funds Documents/Document Resources/10 Year Sector Returns
  
  
  
  I don't know where NovelInvestor got its figures or how it retrofitted the new Real Estate sector into earlier years. That should have been easy to do - Real Estate was simply carved out of Financials, so the other sectors' figures for the past decade should not have been changed. But looking at the NovelInvestor table, it seems they were.
  https://www.reit.com/investing/investor-resources/gics-classification-real-estate
  
  Just wait until the latest sector reorg hits these tables. With IT being split, Media being expanded, and other companies being moved around, it will be difficult to extend these new sectors back in time to create a "virtual" table of how these sectors might have done over the past ten years. (That's because there's ambiguity in how each of the companies would have been classified over the past decade as their businesses matured.)