Last week the S&P 500 hit a fresh record high (6,147) in the first part of the week. However, that was not to last as valuation concerns fueled a wave of profit taking along with the loss of momentum in some of the biggest year-to-date winners. That induced chatter about the market possibly being at a near-term top, which in turn has curtailed buying interest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Growth concerns were also in play following Friday’s economic data. The preliminary February S&P Global US Services PMI fell to contraction territory (i.e. below 50), the final University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment report for February dropped to 64.7, and existing home sales declined 4.9% month-over-month in January. Disappointing results from Walmart (WMT) and fallout in shares of UnitedHealth (UNH) following a Wall Street Journal report that the DOJ has launched a civil fraud investigation into UNH’s Medicare Advantage billing practices also contributed to the selling interest in the latter half of the week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mega cap stocks and small cap stocks saw the largest decline while the rest of the market held up a bit better. The S&P 500 declined 1.7% from last Friday while the equal-weighted S&P 500 registered a 0.7% decline this week, the Russell 2000 fell 3.7%, and the Vanguard Mega Cap Growth ETF (MGK) logged a 2.7% decline. The weakness in the mega cap space led the S&P 500 consumer discretionary (-4.3%) and communication services (-3.7%) sectors, which house mega cap components, to register the largest declines among the 11 sectors. The defensive-oriented sectors like utilities (+1.4%), consumer staples (+0.9%), and health care (+1.1%) were some of the top performers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":15928,"template":"","categories":[479],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20394","opinion-article","type-opinion-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/creandgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opinion-article\/20394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/creandgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opinion-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/creandgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/opinion-article"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creandgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/creandgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creandgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creandgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}