The Barbarian Market Report

Another day, another miserable performance by the market. This time, the culprit seemed to be technology. AAPL sucked. INTC sucked. But pay attention to retail and consumer discretionary. Those two have REALLY sucked for a long time now. Take a look at the performance of the Morgan Stanley Retail Index (the MVRX -- which only assigns a small weight to big-cap retail behemoths such as WMT) since the end of July. It's down more than 15% now. Wow. Retail, consumer discretionary, and gaming -- are these three babies in their own private bear markets? It sure looks that way to me.

One more thing: take the oil and gas sector (and in this I also include refineries and oilfield exploration companies) out of the SPX index... What do we get? A down 15% year-to-date performance from the world's benchmark about the "strength" of the U.S. market -- I call this a bear market, I don't know what you call it. Just some food for thought on a rainy Wednesday here in NYC.