BofA: Here’s Another Sign the Bull Market Is Running Out of Steam

A huge chunk of this year’s increase in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index is attributable to just two sectors—retail and health care—according to Bloomberg News.

So-called breadth has long been considered indicative of a bull market’s health, with many companies and industries gaining value within a single index considered a sign of robust, upward momentum. With the S&P 500 now exhibiting the tightest sector clustering for an advancing year since at least 2000, there are worries about the aging U.S. bull run in stocks and echoes of historic parallels. Just six tech companies accounted for 55 percent of the S&P 500’s gain in the year leading up to the peak of the dot-com bubble, for instance. (Here’s the Wall Street Journal with a similar story on the “six stocks that matter” to the Nasdaq Composite currently.)