Now that earnings season is winding down and ahead of the start of summer vacations, it is a good time to examine your allocations among the ten sectors and make adjustments as necessary. Reports from individual companies over the past several weeks could have resulted in your portfolio being unbalanced due to large moves in some individual stocks and industries. Now is a great opportunity to take some profits in some areas that may have run lately, while adding to positions that may now be underweighted.

Earnings season didn’t provide a lot of surprises, and didn’t cause us to change our sector recommendations, for now. But we are on heightened alert as headwinds appear to be gathering, which could change the economic landscape. For now, however, we remain relatively bullish on the overall stock market and are keeping a more cyclical bent to our sector recommendations. The commentary we heard during earnings reporting season largely reinforced what we believed going in. Tech companies largely reported solid demand and were relatively optimistic about the coming quarters, although there were sporadic supply issues certain companies are having to deal with due to the Japanese disaster. Also, consumer-related companies noted continued pricing pressures, although demand remained decent, for now. And finally, financials reported a largely mixed bag, as increased capital market activity and loss provision write-downs were met with revenue-damaging regulations.

As mentioned, we are maintaining our sector recommendations for now. Technology and energy remain at outperform as we continue to believe economic growth is now self-sustaining, which should help these more cyclical areas generate revenue. We continue to like the information technology space.  With large cash balances, increasing dividend payments, solid management and tight inventory controls, the tech sector is far more stable than it was in the late 1990s environment that so many still remember. We've been touting this stability as one of the reasons to stick with the group. We believe those who remain invested in tech will be rewarded with outperformance in the coming months.

As for the energy sector, following events in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) as well as Japan that rattled oil markets, causing wide swings in the price of crude, we have seen a bit of calm return to the market and oil has drifted slightly lower. We believe this is more of a short-term phenomenon and volatility is likely to reaccelerate in the energy space. We suggest continuing to use pullbacks as opportunities to add to positions as necessary and believe the sector will outperform over the next several months.

On the flip side, both consumer staples and consumer discretionary remain at underperform. Consumer staples fundamentals are not terrible - as wage growth remains constrained, inventories are lean and expense control is good. However, commodity costs are rising, and the group retains relatively little pricing power. As a result, margins appear poised to be compressed, which could have a detrimental effect on stock prices. As for consumer discretionary, we continue to believe this sector will underperform in the coming months relative to the overall market. We want to note that this does not mean we think that consumer spending in going to fall off a cliff, but that there are challenges that we believe will weigh on the sector in the near term.  As it is a highly competitive environment in the consumer space, pricing power remains elusive. Additional challenges for consumer names come from increased costs due to higher energy and other commodity costs.

We also continue to hold a market perform rating on healthcare, industrials, materials, financials, telecommunications and utilities. Our recommendations can and do change quickly at times as we continually monitor economic progress and specific factors influencing individual sectors.

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

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