Kully Samra, UK branch director at Charles Schwab, gives his views on the US market.

This week brings a couple of changes to our sector recommendations. We're moving the consumer discretionary sector to underperform from marketperform and moving the financial sector up to marketperform from underperform.

Starting with the consumer discretionary sector, we're not necessarily extremely bearish on American consumers; in fact, we believe that the unemployment rate will continue to improve. However, we do believe the sector will perform relatively poorly over the next several months, leading to our move. One reason for the downgrade is our belief regarding where we are in the economic cycle. As a so-called 'early cyclical' group, the consumer discretionary sector tends to perform well during the initial stages of an economic recovery. At this point, we believe we're well past that and into a maturing phase of economic expansion, where investors may look to rotate money out of the discretionary sector.

We also believe the recent rise in commodity costs will impact profitability in the sector. With low levels of pricing power, it's difficult for companies to pass along increased input costs to consumers. Conversely, consumers are having to pay more for necessities, leaving less money for discretionary purchases—potentially hurting both the top and bottom lines in the group. Also, unemployment remains high, credit standards are still relatively tight and the housing market continues to bump along the bottom.

To offset this move, we're moving the financial sector from underperform to marketperform. While we continue to view this group with caution because many challenges - especially from the housing and mortgage areas - remain, we believe there are enough positive developments to warrant a more-neutral view. Increasing loan demand at the business level should help bolster profits, while more robust merger-and-acquisition activity and an increase in IPOs should provide more revenue.

New regulations limiting the trading that financial institutions can do for themselves - historically, a major profit driver for some companies - remain a concern for us. And new capital requirements restrict the amount of money banks can lend, limiting profit potential for many of them. While it's true the regulatory environment is increasingly onerous for financials, we also believe that much of that potential damage has been reflected in their stock prices, leading to the possibility of upside surprises as the always creative industry reacts to new regulations.

In addition to these two changes, we're maintaining our outperform recommendation on energy, though we suggest any investors with outsized positions after the recent run look to take some profits, as we could see a near-term pullback. Also, the consumer staples sector remains rated at underperform.

We also continue to hold a outperform rating on information technology. Healthcare, industrials, materials, telecom and utilities hold a marketperform rating.

Our recommendations can and do change quickly at times as we continually monitor economic progress and specific factors influencing individual sectors.