Wednesday Recap: Financials Lead Market Astray

The sector that has struggled the most thus far this year, Financials, was the sector down the most yesterday as well, falling 5.06%. Materials and Energy followed up Financials on the downside while Health Care and Consumer Staples, both defensive sectors, held up the best.

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We sorted the Russell 1,000 by decile based on each stock's YTD performance going into yesterday. When we calculated the average percent change yesterday of stocks within each decile, we found that the stocks that were down the most on the year going into the day were also down the most on the day. This is a result of the continued weakness in Financial stocks that investors continue to dump. As shown below, the decile of the worst performing stocks on the year going into yesterday were down an average of 4.4% versus the overall Russell 1,000 performance of -2.84%.

Below we highlight the 20 best and worst performing stocks in the Russell 1,000 yesterday.

Below we highlight all one-day declines of 2% or more for the S&P 500 in 2007. As shown, the index has been positive on the following day 7 out of 8 times and positive over the following week just 4 out of 7 times.