Are Large Cap Consumer Staple and Health Care Stocks Really Recession Proof?

A recent poster on this blog commented on the "Anti-Recession Stocks that can survive a US Slowdown" blog post. The poster said:

Well you were most certainly wrong. Too bad folks like you can't get out of the mindset that just because a company is big and been around a while doesn't mean it's stock will do well.

Let's evaluate the stocks chosen in the previous blog entry to see whether or not the stock selection was wrong. The assumption is that large consumer staple and health care stocks tend to survive slowdowns and recessions.

Assumption: Sector Rotation

But first, let us look at an assumption. Let us assume that a portfolio is 100% in stocks, and whether the market goes down or up, the portfolio manager (you) has to remain 100% invested. In this case, we have to either hold the stocks we currently own, or we have to rotate into other stocks.

Many professional money managers have to do the same. They are supposed to maintain a percentage of their fund in equities, and when the market goes down, they could rotate stocks from one sector to another.

The Slowdown/Recession playbook tells us to rotate into large cap consumer staples and health care stocks as a safer investment to ride out the slowdown or recession.

With this assumption in mind, six stocks were selected in the previous blog post that were "anti-recession." Most are large cap, consumer staple or healthcare stocks, except one, Sun Healthcare (SUNH) which is a small cap health care stock.

Performance of the Stocks

From January 7, 2008 (around the time the previous blog entry was written) to today, July 15, 2008, here is the performance of the stocks:

1. SPY (S&P 500 ETF): -13.47%
   
2. PG (Procter and Gamble): -10.27%
   
3. UL (Unilever): -25.97%
   
4. MO (Altria): -11%
   
5. GILD (Gilead): +15.28%
   
6. SUNH (Sun Healthcare): -17.71%
   
7. PEP (Pepsi): -14.2%
   

All of the results above do not include dividends. If you include dividends, the performance of the stocks above would be better.

In addition, instead of choosing SUNH, we had chosen it's competitor, Kindred Healthcare (KND), the return during this period of KND would have been +20.16% instead of SUNH's -17.71%

The Results

Period: January 7, 2008 to July 15, 2008:


Average of the Six Anti-Recession Stocks (no dividends): -10.65%
S&P 500 Performance: -13.47%


The Six "anti-recession" stocks outperformed the market by almost 3%. In this difficult bear market, outperforming the market is a good thing.

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