Market Strength Fades

Nick Perry (Schaeffer's Investment Research) submits: Last week, we saw a broad based bounce-back that was led by Oil Service HOLDRS (OIH). This week shows that bounce-back fading:

click to enlarge

Continuing the recent pattern of "all-for-one" consistency, 90% of the ETFs on my list were lower this week. In last week's column, I said that "energy-related stocks seemed to be the bovine sector of choice this week" and that appears to be true this week, to a degree....

The Oil Service HOLDRS (OIH) took the top slot last week and takes third place in the current chart. Viewed in isolation, I would be hard pressed to call a gain of less than 1% as "strong," but in the context of broad-based selling, it is a different story. Money has clearly been flowing into the oil services group.

A look to the bottom of the list shows that realty, housing, utilities, and biotech were among the weakest groups. The iShares C&S Realty Majors (ICF) and SPDR Homebuilders (XHB) were the two bottom-performing funds, but they were only fractionally weaker. In other words, the selling appeared widespread.

See details on this week's top performing ETF: PowerShares Clean Energy ETF Hits New High

Index performance this week:

Index performance year to date:

Charts: Google Finance