For many Americans, it seems feels the world could end based on the result of today's election.
While we've certainly made our contribution to forecasting the potential market impacts of the election, we wanted to take a moment to reiterate that regardless of what happens, the sun will rise on Wednesday and not much will change. Josh Brown, at The Reformed Broker blog, said it best:
90% of the US economy is based on the fact that tomorrow you will need to make the lunches and put the kids on the school bus. You’ll drop off dry cleaning or catch a flight to visit relatives or go to Home Depot (NYSE:HD) for a new set of garbage cans. You will go to work where your company makes things or provides services for other people’s companies. Marketers will be using your personal information, harvested from the apps on your phone, in order to sell you the products you’ve already searched for. Your dog will still need to be fed and your family members will still need to be bought birthday presents.
This is the baseline. Things will mostly be the same for all of us.
So rather than write yet another election-dependent post, we're focusing on a trend that should have legs beyond just today: the continuing outperformance of technology stocks.
As the chart below shows, technology stocks (XLK) have had a strong year in aggregate. The sector has gained over 25% from its January trough and after pulling back to test its 100-day MA last week, is once again knocking on the door of a breakout to new decade-plus highs above the 48.00 level.
Source: Stockcharts.com
As always, we also like to look at sector performance relative to the broader stock market. After all, a big rally in a certain sector is not nearly as impressive if the overall stock market has rallied by a similar amount (or even more). Looking at the ratio chart (XLK/SPY), we can see the tech stocks have been outperforming on a relative basis as well:
Source: Stockcharts.com
Given the strong absolute and relative bullish trends in the tech sector, we'll be looking for buying opportunities in the days and weeks to come. Top holdings in the sector include AAPL, MSFT, FB, GOOGL, T, INTC, VZ, CSCO, V, IBM and ORCL, all of which are in our US equity universe.