Stocks, so far, are higher for the month of February. But it has been a wild ride, with earnings reports and inflation data causing a lot of volatility. Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre take a closer look at some of the areas if the market that have been performing well despite the whipsaw market action.
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Editor's note: This article was written by Stephanie Mikulich.
Video Transcript
SEANA SMITH: All right. Well, we're nearly just about 35 minutes into the trading day. Major markets trading to the downside. We're still seeing some pressure here across the board. The NASDAQ leading the way lower. The biggest underperformer in today's early market action, off just about 1%. But is there some reason to be a bit optimistic. Jared Blikre is standing by at the big board for us to tell us more. Jared?
JARED BLIKRE: Seana, there is reason to be optimistic. And hold on a second here. I just want to point out my first point here is that February tends to be a down month for the markets, for stocks, in general, especially in this year of the presidential cycle. But that doesn't mean that we're looking to sell everything.
In fact, we've seen some weakness over the last five days in some of those market leaders. And we want to figure out what could be leading next. In other words, we have sector rotation going on. And we want to take a look at what is taking the place of these tech stocks.
This is a SPDR sector action over the last five days. Tech, by far, the worst of the sectors, then consumer discretionary and communication services. Not a coincidence that those are the megacap sectors.
And you take a look at what's happened in the chip space over the last five days. We have not seen a lot of bullish action here as well. So what has been working recently? We've seen a number of markets come to record highs only recently. And this is the five-day total.
I just want to start with the Nikkei 225. We'd have to look at a max chart here. This is only now starting to eclipse the highs we saw in 1989. And this could very well be one of the largest cup and handle patterns I've ever seen. With the cup potentially happening later on in this decade. I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves. But just to point out that markets can come back.
Now, health care is another interesting one. Let me just dial this down to a three-year chart. Only recently did we break to record highs. Health care is the second best sector of the year. And a lot of that has to do with these weight loss drugs. But there are pockets in there also in biotech that have perked up recently.
So that is another industry and sector that deserves some attention. Also VanEck vectors oil refiners ETF-- these are the guys that make the crude oil, turn it into gasoline. Only recently, came to record highs here. We saw energy as one of the big plays in 2022, but not necessarily so much last year. But oil is on investors' radars once again.
And also want to check out IYT. This is iShares transportation ETF. You can see, it's just barely breaking out of a three-year consolidation here. One of the big things I like about that is Uber. All the strength we've been seeing in Uber is propelling that to record highs.
Interestingly, it's not a part of the Dow Jones transport. So you've got to watch your ETFs. But transports, in general, are another thing I'm keeping my eyes on here.
SEANA SMITH: Lots of other things for investors to potentially buy and bet on here other than tech. The theme that we've been talking about now for quite some time. All right. Jared, thanks so much.
