OREANDA-NEWS. All stocks listed for trading can be grouped to a particular business sector. This means that all of 766 Singapore’s stocks that are currently listed for trading can be sort into a dozen or so key business fields. These individual business fields can be subject to distinct economic and market drivers.

Consumer Staples was the best performing of the sectors in May, with a 3.5% average market capitalisation weighted total return. This followed on from Consumer Staples also being the best performing of the sectors in April with a 5.8% return. Stocks within the Consumer Staples Sector are most focused on food, beverage and other non-durable products and services. This can include plantations to manufacturers and packagers to food retailers. 

The respective sector performances over the past 12 months are illustrated in the chart below.

Source: SGX, Bloomberg, SGX StockFacts. Source Sector performance weighed to market cap at each quarter or month end, in SGD and dividend inclusive. *based on median – due to high returns of one stock. RE D & Man = Research Management & Development.

The 20 largest capitalised Consumer Staples stocks have averaged a 16.3% YTD total return with a ratio of 3 gainers to 1 decliner. The average Return on Equity (ROE) for the 20 stocks is 10.8%.  The best performing stocks of the 20 in the YTD were Sino Grandness Food Industry, GMG Global and Japfa. The full performance details of these 20 stocks are detailed in the table below. Click on a stock name to see the full profile in SGX StockFacts.

Source: SGX, Bloomberg & SGX StockFacts (data as of 1 Jun 2016)

The second best performing sector in May was Utilities, with a 2.9% average market capitalisation weighted total return. This also followed on from Utilities being the second best performing of the Sectors in April with a 5.3% return. The five largest capitalised stocks within the Utilities Sector are detailed in the table below.

Source: SGX, Bloomberg & SGX StockFacts (data as of 1 Jun 2016)

As illustrated in the top chart, over the past 12 months as many as eight different sectors featured in the month’s best performing sector. These sector definitions are based on the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS®) categorisations with the impact of individual stock performances weighed to individual market capitalisations. GICS is an industry taxonomy developed in 1999 by MSCI and Standard & Poor's (S&P) for use by the global financial community and is also used to categorise stocks on SGX StockFacts.

Using these sector definitions, since the beginning of 2015, the combined gains of the best performing sectors of the month summed up to 104.1% in total return. On the other side of the coin, the summed decline of the least performing sector over the past 12 months was a decline of 84.3%. This return differential demonstrates some of the significant variation in sector performances in Singapore over the past 17 months.