Yesterday’s entry discussed year-to-date global equity performance at the country level. The chart below measures global sector performance, using the Dow Jones Wilshire Global indexes. (Note: These are price-appreciation, rather than total-return figures.)

As would be expected, Total Market performance at the sector level (-27.1% through today) is in line with average country returns (-29.0% through yesterday). So even though we are looking through different lenses, and using an entirely different family of (tracking, rather than investable) indexes for the sector analysis, the message is clear: Global equity markets have provided nowhere to hide this year for long-biased investors, regardless of any geographic or sector mandates or constraints.

We also looked at global sector performance on a risk-adjusted basis. The modified Sharpe-ratio analysis (bottom chart) adjusts returns for annual standard deviation without accounting for a risk-free alternative (which is unnecessary here — we want to rank sectors against each other, not compare any one of them to a portfolio of short-term Treasurys). The risk-adjusted numbers reveal, to no one’s surprise, that financials have substantially underperformed most other sectors on a global basis this year — though the fact that telecom has done even worse (and vastly underperformed technology) is an eye-opener for us.

Putting this analysis together with yesterday’s suggests that it’s time to start tracking international (preferably Asian or emerging-market) telecoms. ♦