Utility stocks have seen a big internal surge

The past few days have seen U.S. stocks chop up and down. One of the few exceptions has been the utilities sector, which on a total return basis reached the highest level since the March crash. 

As a result, the percentage of stocks in this sector above their 50-day moving averages surged from less than 15% to greater than 78% within 2 weeks.

We've seen repeatedly in the past that a staid sector like utilities does not tend to do well in the short-term after big bouts of positive momentum. There are some signs of that here, and shorter-term returns have been mostly weak as noted above. Longer-term, however, the bias was solidly higher.

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We also looked at:

• More detail on the internal strength in utilities
• Despite the gains, ETF traders are pulling money from funds like XLU
• Corporate insiders have been very busy in utility stocks