Energy and financial sectors which lagged badly in 2020 are the top performing sectors in 2021.

Who could have known what lie ahead this time last year? 2020 began with high hopes and ended in the same way. Throughout the year, the pandemic, politics, civil unrest and markets all provided surprising twists and turns. Above all, 2020 seems to have accelerated many new social and economic trends.

COVID benefiting sectors like technology and consumer discretionary have done very well while energy, banks and real estate are down sharply YTD.

We await the next phase of the Federal aid package. Negotiations between the House and Senate are continuing beyond the July 31st date, when supplemental unemployment benefits ended.

In this past quarter we saw a 20% rally in the S&P 500 index. We finished June up 41% off the March 23 low. Q3 starts off -8.6% from the market top of 3393.52, yet -3% YTD at 3100.29 on June 30, 2020.

Something happened last week that hasn’t happened in 29 years, according to Macro Ops. "96 percent of the S&P 500 stocks were above their 50-day moving average.