We see what we believe are some great opportunities right now in Healthcare -- and we like the sector overall. Argus Director of Research Jim Kelleher, CFA, recently completed his quarterly sector review and raised Healthcare sector to Over-Weight from Market-Weight. The healthcare environment is undergoing rapid transitions, and we now see an unfolding period of significant promise and opportunity. Our newly-favored stance is based on resumption of deferred medical procedures and significant new quality-of-life drugs and treatments. The category is broad and has underperformed the S&P 500 over the past year. The Healthcare sector ETF (XLV) is up 15% over the past year compared to a gain of 31% for the S&P 500. We see opportunity here to pick up some steady companies, with big brands and solid financials. These companies are science-focused and enhance lives. They are innovators. In our list this week, we look across several subsectors within the Healthcare sector and pull out some leaders we like. These stocks also are included in our Focus List and Model Portfolios, as noted below.

IQVIA Holdings is the world's largest provider of biopharmaceutical development services and commercial outsourcing services. The company is the result of the 2016 merger of Quintiles Transnational, a contract research organization, and IMS Health, a healthcare data and analytics provider. IQVIA is headquartered in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. IQVIA provides advanced analytics, technology solutions, and clinical research services to the life sciences industry in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific. It operates through three segments: Technology & Analytics Solutions, Research & Development Solutions, and Contract Sales & Medical Solutions. IQVIA provides intelligent connections across all aspects of healthcare through its analytics, technology, big data resources and extensive domain expertise. IQVIA's Connected Intelligence delivers actionable insights to enable customers to accelerate the clinical development and commercialization of new therapies. The company has about 86,000 employees. IQVIA has one of the largest collections of healthcare information in the world, which includes more than 1.2 billion comprehensive, longitudinal, non-identified patient records spanning sales and prescription data, medical claims, electronic medical records, genomics and social media.

Almost two months in 2024, and stocks have seen more recovery highs and the major indices have seen more all-time highs. The S&P 500 (SPX) rose 1.7% in the week ended February 23, the S&P 100 popped 1.9%, the Nasdaq and the Nasdaq 100 added 1.4%, the S&P 400 tacked on 1%, and the Russell 2000 lost 0.9%. For the SPX, the '100,' and both Nasdaq indices, the week was the fifteenth of 17 on the upside; it is 14 of 17 for the '400.' During the 17 weeks, the SPX has gained 23.6%, while both Nasdaq indices are up over 26%. Those are great returns for a full year!

IQVIA is the result of the 2016 merger of Quintiles, a leading global contract research organization, and IMS Health, a leading healthcare data and analytics provider. The Research & Development segment focuses primarily on providing outsourced late-stage clinical trials for pharmaceutical, device, and diagnostic firms. The technology and analytics segment provides aggregated information and technology services to clients in the healthcare industry, including pharmaceutical companies, providers, payers, and policymakers, as well as data and analytics capabilities for clinical trials, including virtual trials. The company also has a small contract sales business.