Money Management, using FE Analytics, looked at the performance of the ASX 200 sectors over the course of the year to see which sectors are lagging, and which have thrived.
It’s probably no surprise given the negative publicity of the Royal Commission that financials have taken a massive hit this year, with their year to last month’s end returns sitting at -7.80 per cent, which is around 10 per cent less than the S&P ASX 200 index.
The telecommunication services sector similarly took a blow this year, with returns of -7.29 per cent, which could be driven by the dropping share price of Telstra this year.
Sitting ahead of the worst-performing sectors but still in the bottom three is the industrials sector, which returned 1.69 per cent for the year, and the S&P ASX 200 sits just above that at 2.94 per cent.
At the other end of the spectrum, healthcare sat at the top of the ladder this year with 23.73 per cent returns, and information technology sat just behind it at 17.67 per cent returns, a figure that’s remained fairly stagnant across three years as well.
An oil boom this year saw the energy sector sit in third place, with returns of 15.25 per cent, and consumer staples sat comfortably at 11.73 per cent.
Consumer discretionary had a big fall from 10.50 per cent across three years to 3.59 per cent in the year to date, which follows the global trend of consumers spending less on discretionary items and more on staples.
The S&P ASX 200 still holds about 32.4 per cent of the portfolio in financials, 18.2 per cent in materials, 8.5 per cent in health care and eight per cent in consumer staples.
Around eight per cent of the portfolio is assigned to industrials, 7.7 per cent to real estate, 5.8 per cent to energy and 4.1 per cent to consumer discretionary.
And, despite the IT sector continuing to produce good returns, the index only holds 2.1 per cent of the portfolio in IT, with the smallest portion of the portfolio left to utilities.
The chart below shows the performance of the sectors as compared to the S&P ASX 200 benchmark for the year to 31 October 2018.
