The Markets This Week


It has become a familiar refrain this year but one that’s by no means unwelcome: Stocks hit record highs last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 15,000 for the first time, and equities rose about 1% on a lack of bad news, on decent earnings and economic news, and perhaps from just plain habit.


Nothing seems to unnerve this market; old bogeymen, like European debt woes and North Korean saber-rattling, remain locked in the basement for now, says Jonathan Corpina, a senior managing partner at Meridian Equity Partners. The worry, if there were one, is that such concerns could return and swat the market during the soon-to-arrive languid summer months, a time when markets traditionally look for things to worry about, Corpina adds.


For now, investors are busily rotating out of defensive stocks, he says, and moving money into technology and financial shares. Our guess is that only a sudden swoon will change that.


On the week, the Dow closed at 15,118.49, up 145 points, or 1%, and an all-time high. The S&P 500 increased 19 points, to 1633.70, also a new high-water mark. The Nasdaq Composite index jumped 1.7%, or 58 points, to 3436.58.


With the Dow up 15% already this year, it’s getting tougher to find relatively cheap stocks inside this 30-member and exclusive megacap club. The average 2013 ratio of price/earnings per share for the index is now about 14, with a high of 21.5 times for Home Depot (ticker: HD) and a low of six for Hewlett-Packard(HPQ), according to Thomson Reuters. The average earnings-per-share growth expected this year is just 3%.


For investors looking at the Dow now, it’s worth noting that in the past three weeks the broad market has seen a rotation into stocks in sectors like tech, up 9%; materials, up 7%; and energy, up 6%. Concurrently, defensive sectors that have been popular all year—consumer staples, health care, and telecoms—have begun to trail the market. That could represent a shift to a search for growth from a search for yield Source:  Barrons Online).