Stock Market Sectors Classification

There are many ways in which stocks can be classified. One of the most preferred ones is by the sector in which the particular business that issues the stocks falls. This classification, which includes the grouping together of companies from the same sector, is done for the purposes of facilitating comparisons between the companies' stocks.

However, many classifications by sectors can be found. One of them divides the market into eleven sectors, where two of them are referred to as defensive, whereas the other nine are referred to as cyclical.

Let's now turn our attention to these two classifications and examine them at a closer look.

Cyclical Stocks

Stocks from the cyclical classification tend to be sensitive to the market conditions, especially to its cycles, as their name implies. The good news is that if one sector is down, another sector may experience an upward trend.

This classification includes nine of the sectors that fall in the sector division. They are as follows:

1. Capital Goods
2. Energy
3. Technology
4. Health care
5. Communications
6. Transportation
7. Basic materials
8. Consumer cyclical
9. Financial

As it can be seen from the list above, investors will not find any difficulty in recognizing whether a particular business belongs to one cyclical sector or another.

Defensive Stocks

This classification includes two of the sectors that fall in the sector division. They are as follows:

1. Utilities
2. Consumer staples

These sectors are less susceptible to market cycles since no matter what the market conditions are people will not stop consume food or electricity. Stocks from these sectors are used as a balancing and protection mechanism by many investors in their portfolios in case the market starts to go down.

However, the advantage of defensive stocks can be their drawback as well. This is so, since no matter what the conditions of the market are people will probably not start to consume more energy or food, so when the market is up, the prices of defensive stocks may not go up as well.

Stock Sectors Purpose

The main purpose of stocks sectors is to facilitate investors' comparison of different stocks. Moreover, comparison of stocks within a particular sector can be very useful if you want to see how your sectors are performing relative to stocks within the same sector.

However, try to use the classifications of various sources, since different sources use different set of sectors.

Final Piece of Advice

Use stock sectors to make effective and reliable comparisons between your stocks and the other from the same sector. This is recommended in order to see whether there are any drastic differences in the performance and if there are such to regulate the disparities.

For a trading platform we recommend you try Zecco.
Zecco offers free stock trades, no account minimum, real time quotes, trading community, and is also insured and protected against loss by SIPC. Opening a Zecco account to benefit from $0 Stock/ETF trading is a smart idea. Free stock trades allow you to preserve more of your wealth and save money, which you can invest instead of paying brokerage commissions.

When looking to save money on trades in order to have more to invest, you should definitely check the promotion OptionsHouse is currently running. Open a new account and get 100 free trades.

For knowledge we can highly recommend you subscribe to the The Wall Street Journal.

Bookmark this page :