Hugh Johnson Sector Quotations

Yesterday's weak ISM number shows the manufacturing sector is just limping along. Another report this week suggests that Friday's August employment report may not be very good. Worries about the economy resurface and are reflected in stocks,

When you see buying in that (technology) sector in a bear market, it implies that there are investors out there who see improvement around the corner, and it's usually technology and cyclical stocks that lead the market out of a downtrend. The bias towards Friday's data may be that the data will be consistent with the view that the economy is showing some expansion.

Every market sector has a lot of good companies in it.

Although they were close to expectations and maybe a little bit weaker, the numbers confirm that the economy generally is slowing, ... The report also confirms that the manufacturing sector of the economy is contracting.

If you separate out all the sectors of the market, it's no longer the case that technology is the most overvalued sector of the market, health care and energy actually carry higher valuations than technology now. So we are starting to get the levels overall in technology that really make some sense. And interestingly enough, if you take it even further, if you go to the individual stocks, stocks like Sun, Cisco, Texas Instruments, Oracle -- great names, they're starting to get to levels which, again, don't call them cheap, but call them cheaper and interesting,