In This Article:
Investors have been turning to the healthcare sector (XLV) as they search for safe haven investments amid recent market turbulence. Market Domination anchor Julie Hyman details how the industry has been outperforming the broader market (^DJI, ^IXIC, ^GSPC), noting some of the standouts in the sector.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination here.
This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.
With increased market volatility and the threat of tariffs looming, investors have been searching for safer havens, and healthcare sectors have been front and center. So far in 2025, healthcare is outperforming the Dow, the S&P, and the NASDAQ, although not every company in the space has been the picture of health. But let's take a look at the overall sector picture so far for the S&P 500 this year. The S&P itself up by about 1.4%, but healthcare has been the best-performing group. This is a look at today's chart. If you look at it year to date, you see here it is up about 7 and a half percent. The one-year chart less positive, so really the comeback has been this year where we have seen this strength. And you can look at a couple of the different sub-sectors, if you will. This is looking specifically at the pharmaceutical group, and you can kind of equal weight it to get a look. CVS has been the best performing individual stock within that S&P pharmaceutical index. It's up almost 42%. Viking Therapeutics, one of those that has seen a pullback here, but by and large, the drug makers have done pretty well. Then you have the sort of some of the insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, UNH, as we know UnitedHealth, under investigation for some of its billing practices. Those shares have pulled back. This has been more of a mixed bag, even though there are a lot of questions about, for example, the new budget that just passed and what effect that is going to have on some of these companies, also some of the cuts that are happening. If you look overall within that S&P healthcare index, as I mentioned, CVS is the best performer. So ventum is one of the best performers as well. Here's CVS. You can see the shares up more than 40% year to date, getting a big leg up in particular after its most recent earnings. So ventum rising after it sold a unit to Thermo Fisher, among other things. So there's sort of some one-off reasons for some of these companies doing particularly well. On the bottom, West Pharmaceuticals is the worst performing stock within this group year to date. So it's a mixed bag under the surface, even as the group overall has definitely outperformed the S&P 500.
