Oil sector, the best performer on Wall Street; Technological were the losers

Wall Street’s main stock indexes closed 2022 with their worst fall since the 2008 financial crisis, interrupting the winning streak of the last three years.

However, one of the few sectors that did well was Energy, where the oil companies are located and one of the main reasons, according to analysts, is the increase in international oil prices.

Within the S&P 500, the five companies that earned the most in 2022 were Occidental Petroleum (119.10%), Constellation Energy (110.53%), Hess (94.02%), Exxon Mobil (80.26%) and Marathon Petroleum (86.62%).

On the contrary, the companies that lost the most were technology companies such as Tesla (-65.03%), Meta (-64.22%), Netflix (-51.05%), Nvidia (-50.26%) and Amazon (-49.50%).

In fact, within the S&P 500, the sectors that lost the most in 2022 were communication services (-40.42%), consumer discretionary (-37.58%), information technology (-28.91%), real estate (-28.45% ), materials (-14.06%) and financial (-12.35%), while the only one that achieved gains was energy (59.04%), according to data from Banco Base.

The losing sectors were affected by the increase in interest rates, high inflation and the war in Europe that led investors to reduce the risk in their investment portfolios and avoid overvalued, growing and disruptive issuers.

“This is the worst performance for stocks since the 2008 financial crisis and the worst, at least for a century, for the bond market. The latter is important because there were not only general falls in the stock markets but also in bonds”, explained Jacobo Rodríguez, director of Analysis at Black Wallstreet Capital.

The technological NASDAQ Composite fell 33.10%; the S&P 500, the most representative stock index on Wall Street, lost 19.44%, while the Dow Jones fell 8.78 percent. These falls have been the most dramatic since 2008, when the NASDAQ and S&P 500 lost 40.54 and 38.49%, respectively.

In Europe, the stock markets also posted red numbers in the year. Germany’s DAX was down 12.35%, France’s CAC 40 was down 9.50%, while Britain’s FTSE 100 was one of the few stocks to gain, up a slight 0.91 percent.

judith.santiago@eleconomista.mx