S&P 500 Sectors Provide Little Reward for Stock Picking

Picking industry-group leaders and avoiding laggards has done relatively little to help money managers beat U.S. stock benchmarks this year, as LPL Financial Research wrote in a blog posting Tuesday. The gap between the best and worst performers among the S&P 500 Index’s sectors was 14.9 percentage points for the year through Tuesday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Full-year spreads have been at least 27.3 points since 1989, when calculations of the sector indexes begin.