Last week I wrote about using the Business Sector Viewer along with RTRanking to identify stock market leaders. By leaders, I meant those stocks which were rising smartly and likely to power the market higher over a period of weeks or months. As you may recall, I concluded that even though the Utility Business Sector had the highest RT and RTRanking, Utility stocks were not capable of being leaders.

The reason for this conclusion was that the Utility Sector did not demonstrate the price behavior suggestive of leaders. RTRanking showed that this Sector fell behind when the market was rising early this year. Although it held up pretty well during the recent downturn, I expect the prices of leaders to explode in the upturn. I like to use the Delta function to see which stocks, groups and sectors are leading the way higher, and there are several ways this may be done.

One of my favorite techniques is to track Business Sector Price performance, week-by-week, from the low point of a downturn to the current date. Since the Price of the VectorVest Composite hit bottom on June 13th, I did a 1-Week Business Sector Price Delta, sorted by percent change on June 20th. The following week, I did a 2-Week Price Delta and so on. It's extremely interesting to note that the former leaders, Steel, Mining, and Metal Products, led the rebound in the June 13th to July 3rd rally. Our old friend, the Utility Sector, wasn't even keeping up with the VVC. On July 11th, the fourth week from the June 13th low, however, the former market leaders were still showing the largest gains, but our old friend, Utility, was now ranked above the VVC. The following week, it joined the ranks of the top 10 gainers with a paltry five week gain of 2.79%.

On August 15th, nine weeks from the June 13th bottom, Mining, Petroleum and Metal Products were still showing the largest gains with Utility in fourth place, having gained 8.16%. Not bad, but were the former leaders going to be the new leaders? As of September 5th, twelve weeks after the June bottom, the former leaders, Mining, Steel, Metal Products, and Petroleum were still leading the rebound. If you read last week's essay, "Looking For Leaders," you know I wasn't comfortable with that picture. I wanted to see some new blood.

Well, we got it last week. Mining, Steel, Metal Products, and Petroleum stocks got hammered, and utility stocks were little changed. It was proclaimed that the Bull market in commodities is over. The big gainers for the week were Retail, Internet, Building and Apparel. The biggest gainer for 13 weeks is REIT. Are you kidding me? I'm still looking for New Leaders.