The Winning Stock Funds This Time Weren’t Tech. They Were Energy.

At the beginning of the year, if I’d had to guess what sector of the stock market would outperform all others, the easy answer would have been technology.

Yet that’s not what happened for fund investors in the three months through September. Tech stock funds tracked by Morningstar dropped 1.4 percent, which really wasn’t too bad in a quarter with losses nearly everywhere you looked.

Instead, the big winner was energy.

The average U.S. energy stock fund rose 11.6 percent for the quarter — a truly splendid return compared with a decline of 1.8 percent, on average, for domestic stock funds and a loss of 2.2 percent for the average taxable bond fund. International stock funds fared poorly, too, with a loss of 0.6 percent, on average. Municipal bond funds in the United States, which are typically sheltered from some state and local taxes, were even worse, averaging a decline of 5.6 percent.

What changed things in the stock and bond markets in those months was mainly the war with Iran, which drove up the prices of oil, gas, refined fuel and other energy products and contributed mightily to an interest-rate surge that has disrupted the financial world.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/business/stock-bonds-tech-energy.html