Leaders-Laggards
Key Highlights * Investor positioning is shifting toward consumer staples as volatility rises and earnings visibility fades. * Pricing power and brand loyalty are allowing select staples companies to defend margins despite slower growth. * Essential household goods, food, tobacco, and discount retail historically outperform during market corrections. * Predictable cash flows and durable
Leaders-Laggards
Key Highlights * The Trump administration’s December 18, 2025 executive order materially advanced federal cannabis rescheduling. * A move to Schedule III would remove 280E tax constraints, reshaping cannabis company cash flows. * Cannabis reform is no longer a purely partisan issue, altering political risk assumptions. * Several U.S. operators are positioned
Leaders-Laggards
Key Highlights * A multi-year global rearmament cycle is underway, driven by active wars, renewed great-power rivalry, and depleted military inventories.¹ * Defense spending growth is increasingly structural rather than cyclical, with record budgets and long-dated procurement commitments.¹² * Market pricing remains uneven, leaving several strategically critical aerospace and defense
Leaders-Laggards
After more than a decade in the shadows, nuclear energy is reasserting itself as a strategic pillar of the global energy system. What has changed is not just sentiment, but necessity. Explosive growth in electricity demand from AI data centers, renewed energy-security priorities, and an increasingly supportive policy environment
Leaders-Laggards
After spending much of the past decade in relative obscurity, platinum has re-emerged as one of the strongest performers in the precious-metals complex. Since late 2024, prices have risen sharply, outpacing both gold and broader equity markets as investors return to hard assets amid persistent inflation and rising
Leaders-Laggards
Silver has dramatically outperformed broader markets this year, driven by a convergence of macro catalysts that have revived interest in precious metals. Persistent inflation, declining real yields, and a shift toward tangible safe-haven assets have strengthened the case for silver, which has long benefited from its dual identity as
Leaders-Laggards
The biotech sector has found its footing again after several difficult years. The equal-weighted S&P Biotechnology ETF (XBI) has staged an impressive rebound, helped by a revival in risk appetite, firmer macro conditions, and a noticeable pickup in dealmaking. Investor sentiment toward innovation had been suppressed through
Leaders-Laggards
Retail stocks have spent most of 2025 on their back foot. The equal-weighted SPDR S&P Retail ETF (XRT) is down for the year, badly trailing the S&P 500’s gain.¹ A rotation away from consumer cyclicals has hardened into a broader risk-off stance, and
Leaders-Laggards
In early November 2025, markets stumbled after an extraordinary tech rally. Global indexes slipped as investors questioned whether the artificial-intelligence (AI) boom had gone too far. Even the entire “Magnificent Seven” — Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Alphabet, and Meta — fell in a single session, with the Nasdaq down about
Leaders-Laggards
The U.S. Utilities sector has outperformed the broader market for most of 2025. As of early November, the Utilities Select Sector ETF (XLU) is up roughly 20% in total return versus 17% for the S&P 500 (SPY)—an apparent lead that masks a volatile year. Despite their
Leaders-Laggards
Summary * Healthcare has lagged the S&P 500 by hundreds of basis points year-to-date, extending a multi-year stretch of underperformance. * Political pressure, patent expirations, and investor rotations into AI and tech have weighed heavily on the sector. * Valuations are now at multi-decade lows, with large-
Leaders-Laggards
The Consumer Staples sector—traditionally a safe haven—has lagged sharply in 2025. Year-to-date, staples have gained barely 3 percent versus more than 15 percent for the S&P 500, making them among the weakest major sector of the stock market. Investors have chased high-growth tech