Take your pick

THE collapse in the oil price is a useful reminder for investors that it helps to pick the right industries. As of December 2nd, global energy stocks were down 8.7% on the year, lagging nearly 31 percentage points behind returns in the best-performing sector of the year, health care.

This divergence between sectors is relatively mild by historical standards. In 2013 there was almost a 39-point gap between the best performer, retailing, and the worst performer, materials, a portmanteau category covering miners, chemical manufacturers and the paper and packaging industry. Robert Buckland, an equity strategist at Citigroup, says that big relative moves among sectors tend to be a function of volatility, and 2014 has been a reasonably calm year.