Semis were supposed to be out of favor, weren’t they?  That’s not the case this morning, though, as positive earnings reports from Texas Instruments (TXN), Lam Research (LRCX), Xilinx (XLNX), and Teradyne (TER) are pushing the semiconductor group higher by over 2.5%. Read today’s Bespoke Morning Lineup below for major macro and stock-specific news events, updated market internals, and commentary.

Bespoke Morning Lineup – 1/24/19

The rally in US equities has taken a bit of a breather in the last couple of days as investors try to digest the gains off of the Christmas Eve lows.  With the rally on pause for the time being, we wanted to take a quick moment to compare the performance of S&P 500 industries so far in 2019 (x-axis) to their performance in Q4 of 2018 (y-axis).  While there are most certainly exceptions, there is a pretty clear trend where the areas of the market that worked in Q4 haven’t really worked all that well in 2019, whereas the industries that were the hardest hit in Q4 have outperformed so far in 2019.

A perfect example is the Energy Equipment Industry, which was the worst performing S&P 500 industry in Q4 (-38%) but has been the best performer so far this year (+16%).  One exception?  Technology Hardware.  In Q4, the industry was down 29.5%, but this year it has also declined, falling 2%.  You can thank Apple (AAPL) for that.