I was just noticing how technology shares have been consistently underperforming the broad market over almost every conceivable recent time period. Take a look at this data, drawn from Google Finance. The numbers do not include today:
- Five day performance: Tech -2%; S&P 500 -0.7%.
- One month: Tech -13.2%, S&P, -2.1%.
- Three months: Tech -5.9%, S&P +4.9%.
- Six months: Tech -12.9%, S&P +3.7%.
- Year to date: Tech +1.2%, S&P +11.9%.
- One year: Tech -4.8%; S%P +15.5%.
So again, over the last 12 months, tech shares have underperformed the broad market by more than 20 percentage points. It's like the whole sector is still stuck in 2001, or 2008. Or 1987. It's seriously ugly.
What's wrong? Well, what's NOT wrong. Weak PC demand is the biggest issue, pulling down the performance of the whole food chain, chips, drives, software, everything. Telecom equipment demand is light, too. Enterprise IT spending is soft. So is online ad spending, thanks in part to the move to mobile devices. Meanwhile, there are big tech businesses with huge problems everywhere you look: Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Dell, Research In Motion, Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel...there's trouble everyplace. And not very many places left to hide.
