Here’s a simple, brutal rule of thumb for the stock market right now: if it’s not energy, it’s probably down. Way down.
Take a look at the S&P 500 this month. It’s a sea of red across nearly every sector you can name—technology, healthcare, industrials, you name it. There’s exactly one green island in that sea: the energy sector. It’s a scene that should feel eerily familiar to anyone who invested through 2022.
Back then, it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that broke the market’s back. An energy shock sent oil prices soaring, inflation surged, and the Federal Reserve embarked on its most aggressive hiking cycle in decades. The lesson was harsh but clear: when energy wins, everything else tends to lose.
Fast forward to today. Over the last 21 days, conflict involving Iran has effectively hit the rewind button, reproducing every key ingredient from that 2022 playbook. Oil spiking above $100 a barrel? Check. Odds of future Fed rate hikes surging? Check. And the same brutal lesson is now visible in the charts all over again.
The Breadth Signal That Should Worry Every Investor
To understand where the market actually stands, you can’t just look at the headline S&P 500 index. That cap-weighted version is dominated by a handful of mega-cap tech stocks, whose performance can mask the ugly decline happening underneath the surface.
The real story is in the equal-weight version, where every company in the index counts the same. That’s tracked by the Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (RSP), and it’s down 7% month-to-date through March 20. That’s its worst monthly performance since September 2022.
Let that sink in. When the RSP falls 7%, it means the average S&P 500 stock has lost nearly 7% of its value this month. September 2022 was the month the Fed raised rates by 75 basis points for the third consecutive time and signaled it would keep tightening until inflation was broken. The market is flashing a signal it hasn’t used in over a year and a half.
This Is The 2022 Script, Playing Out Again
The anatomy of both market episodes is identical. It starts with an energy supply shock that investors try to dismiss as temporary. Then comes an inflation print that proves them wrong. Finally, the Federal Reserve finds itself caught between its mandate to fight inflation and a slowing economy.
In 2022, the S&P 500—as tracked by the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY)—fell 19.4% for the year as the Fed’s tightening crushed equity valuations. The hardest-hit sectors were the most sensitive to interest rates: technology, real estate, and consumer discretionary.
The only winner that year, just like now, was energy. The rotation signal that paid off back then is flashing bright red again today.
