How to keep an eye on the stock market's industry winners
— -- Q: Is there a way to find which industries are performing the best on Wall Street? I'd like to use this information in my stock-selection strategy.
A: You can tell a great deal about a stock by the company it keeps.
Just as teachers rank students based on their standing in the class, investors consider how companies perform compared with their peers.
Many of the financial ratios and measures investors and analysts look at are most meaningful when compared with industry averages.
USA TODAY makes it easy for investors who want to monitor how industry groups are performing. Every Monday online and most Mondays in the print edition, USA TODAY publishes its Market Trends page.
Think of Market Trends as your color-coded map to the markets. With a glance, you can spot which industries are doing the best and worst and pinpoint emerging themes.
You can find the printed edition of Market Trends in the Money section most Mondays. And you can find it online on the front page of USATODAY.com's Money section at money.usatoday.com, on the left side of the page, under Money Features.
Here's a link to today's page (pdf).
Matt Krantz is a financial markets reporter at USA TODAY and author of Investing Online for Dummies. He answers a different reader question every weekday in his Ask Matt column at money.usatoday.com. To submit a question, e-mail Matt at mkrantz@usatoday.com. Click here to see previous Ask Matt columns. Follow Matt on Twitter at: twitter.com/mattkrantz
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