Sector Swap:Why Industrials Are Winning the Peace:

Today the market printed money. The entire market except for the energy sector performed better than they have in the past weeks. The indexes were all in the positive and we saw the VIX drop significantly. As mentioned yesterday, it is definitely a power move taking place behind the scenes, which may not be evident to the naked eye. Regardless, let's take a look at the entire market today and highlight what we are seeing.

First, the main indexes performance from yesterday night to this morning was bullish. NDX with a 4.90% performance tells us about technology, media services and more. SPX with a 3.90% which holds 500 companies across different sectors, while the NDX out performed SPX, it is evident that it was a green day overall. Lastly, INDU with a 3.38% performance, which is the industrial and financial sectors tells us that the banking and industrials also had a green day across the board today.

So while the above tells us about the entire sentiment of the market today, let's zoom in to the ETFs and VIX today to make more sense of it.

In the below, we can see that VIX dropped to low 21.16, which again goes down when the market is performing in the positive, today was an evidence of it. At the same time, when we look at the equity sectors, we can see that the Industrial sector outperformed all the sectors today with a 3.7% change. Given that Iran and the US have reached a 2 weeks ceasefire, it was evident that the oil would significantly drop in price and therefore, the XLE (Energy) sector was going to be underperforming today, we see this in the table below with a -3.5% which is nearly the opposite of XLI (Industrials).

Overall, today was a good day for those who placed call options, we saw a significant jump in price across indexes and the different sectors. If the macro scales are green, then the micro (single company stocks) must follow suit and be green too.

It's a little hard to decide right now which sector to shift towards, especially in a day like today, where everything is green. While you can ultimately analyze the indexes to get an eagle POV, it will start to get granular. For today's purposes, we will look at NDX (Nasdaq) since it outperformed SPX and INDU.

The below chart of NDX shows us the slow rising or recovery that's taken place since March 31, 2026. We can see when NASDAQ entered an oversold period that lasted approximately 5 days, but the recovery has been bullish in the last 2 days.

Let's zoom in and look at Industrials (XLI) performance, which mirrors the same exact thing as NASDAQ

The fact that XLI and NASDAQ mirror each other is a rarity as they aren't part of the same sector. XLI is industrials, while NASDAQ is technology. So I'm taking it a step further and looking at the 1 month return for the industrials since it was the sector that outperformed the entire market today:

Given the above, we can see that GEV has had the highest return in the past month, we can look at its overall performance:

While GEV has relatively maintained strength over the past month, we did see a drop around March 30, which took place around the entire market on that day. However, we also see that the price on April 8, 2026 is the monthly high confirming the weight GEV carries on the XLI. That is to say, if there was a reversal in GEV, XLI would be affected. We have seen that Nasdaq outperformed its sister indexes, but at the same time, we can observe that the investors are slowly shifting from Nasdaq (NDX) to INDU, therefore XLI.

Given what I've seen in today's analysis, I may choose to go back to industrials. Nonetheless, the news have been so shaky and it's nearly the end of the week, plus there are two reports coming up in the next two days, PCE and CPI. I think I will monitor the market over the next two days, continue to focus on XLI sector and decide if it's a good entry for next week. We also have a 2 week ceasefire, which means that we have to be quick with our positioning.