Q1 Recap: 80% of the S&P 500 Trailed the Broader Index

Alan Brochstein, CFA submits: Yesterday, S&P

By Alan Brochstein, CFA: Imagine you are in a football stadium filled to capacity. Most likely, almost everyone there is rooting for the home team. All 83,858 fans. What a crowd! That stadium would be quite loud.

Alex Morris submits: Grab a tape recorder and repeat after me: “The cheapest stocks in the U.S. markets are large cap multinationals.” Now rewind, play the clip, and repeat. Over the past 6 months, this statement has been repeated throughout countless newspapers, interviews with well known/respected investors (Bill Miller and Jeremy Grantham here), blogs, and television broadcasts (ie CNBC).

Alan Brochstein, CFA submits: There has been a lot of debate recently about the implications of "cheap dividend payers." I first wrote about the gift the market was offering this summer (maybe a bit early), arguing that

Michael Krause submits: PowerShares recently listed nine sector ETFs similar to the popular Select Sector SPDRs funds but tracking sectors in the S&P SmallCap 600 index (IJR) inst

Of the ten sectors that stocks are divided into, Consumer Discretionary stocks have been on the longest streak of beating the S&P 500. Telecom stocks, though not on quite as much a streak as Consumer Discretionary, have been outperforming for three years now.

Macquarie Private Wealth released its 2013 global outlook on Wednesday, predicting U.S. stocks would outperform Canadian stocks again this year and declaring the “resource price boom over.” The S&P/TSX Composite index has lagged behind the S&P 500 two years in a row now. In 2012, the index rose 7.2%, but trailed the S&P 500′s much more impressive 16% climb. Macquarie expects the gap to continue in 2013 as resource prices hold steady this year.

Alan Brochstein, CFA submits: Last week was definitely "A Tale of Two Cities", with small caps going in reverse while the Dow Jones Industrial Average motored to a new high.