The market may seem boring today, but look under the hood--something is happening. That "something" is rotation: traders are looking to buy some stocks and sectors, and sell others.
Huh? This is what they used to do, before the Lehman bankruptcy. Then it went away, as they sold everything indiscriminately. Now, normal rotation may be coming back.
Between the Lehman bankruptcy on September 15th and the market bottom on November 20th, it's amazing how little deviation there had been between techs, energy, materials, industrials, even financials--as volatile as they have been--are not far from the overall horrible performance of other sectors.
In other words, not much has outperformed or underperformed in that period. However, since the November 20th bottom, there has been the beginning of efforts to trade stocks as individual investments, rather than as a single asset class. This is very encouraging!
For example, while there was a rally in financials in early December, they have been selling off this week:
Financials this week
JP Morgan up 0.4%
PNC down 1.3%
US Bancorp down 5.7%
Regions Fin. down 6.9%
