Energy Cleans Up as Index Weightings Swing

The ongoing bear market hasn't left investors many bright spots in the past two years.

But as an analysis of the Russell 3000 Index's slump shows when broken down by subsectors, some areas of the broad U.S. stock market have been hit harder than others.

Consumer Staples and Health Care have fared the best. (See related story here.)

As a result, it's not surprising that those two sectors' weightings in the market-cap-sized Russell 3000 have gone up. Since the beginning of 2007 through the end of February, both have seen their weightings go up more than 3 percentage points. (See table below.)

But Energy—which has dropped 20+ percentage points more than either Health Care or Consumer Staples from the bear's peak-to-trough—actually has gained the most of any sector in terms of sector weightings.

In fact, strip out Financials—and to a lesser degree Consumer Discretionary—and the change in weightings from a total stock market view takes a much different angle.

Only the highly cyclical Materials sector has also generated negative benchmark weightings during this period. And those lost a relatively slight 0.89 percentage points.

Then & Now: Russell 3000 Weightings By Sector

Sector	Peak-Trough Loss*	Weight (2/28/07)	Weight (2/27/09)	% Chg
Financials	-75.03%	23.07%	12.58%	-10.49
Materials	-64.16%	4.73%	3.84%	-0.89
Prod Durbls	-62.40%	9.70%	10.89%	+1.19
Cons Discr	-57.01%	14.84%	11.02%	-3.82
Energy	-56.12%	8.40%	12.61%	+4.21
Technology	-54.70%	12.67%	15.39%	+2.72
Utilities	-44.63%	7.70%	8.08%	+0.38
Health Care	-38.31%	12.09%	15.69%	+3.60
Cons Staples	-33.77%	6.81%	9.90%	+3.09

*Jan. 3, 2007-March 4, 2009

-- This report was submitted by IU.com's Murray Coleman.