Sector Rotation Detector · Weekly Scan · Public preview

4 sectors are rotating · 7 stable

Scan day · Saturday, August 22, 2026

Four of eleven S&P 500 sectors are rotating this scan — three flipping to positive leadership (Healthcare, Materials, Energy) and one flipping decisively to negative (Utilities). The Utilities reversal is the largest move in the tape, an 11.3 percentage-point relative-strength swing: after leading SPY modestly a year ago, XLU is down 7.4% over the last 30 calendar days while SPY is up 3.7%. All five most-liquid utility ETFs show net 10-day outflows, with XLU alone shedding $1.26B. Healthcare offers the highest-conviction positive signal, with $6.6B of 10-day money flow into XBI on the mid-August obesity-drug M&A wave; IBB up 13% confirms it is broad biotech participation, not a single-name event. Materials rotated positive on a gold and industrial-metals bid — GDX up 37% pulled $11.2B in 10 days, the largest single-ETF inflow in the entire scan. Energy leadership is quietly institutional: XOP inflows of $5.5B point to accumulation of producers rather than the rig-services trade that dominated 2022. Seven sectors are holding their prior-year disposition — Discretionary and Comm Services still leading, Tech, Financials, Industrials, Real Estate, and Staples still marginally lagging. This is a rotation, not a regime break, but the capital movement into miners, biotech, and E&P producers is large enough to reposition allocations before the next Fed decision.

Headline rotation — fully revealed

Utilities

XLU

Turning negative ↘

RS · now-11.1%

RS · 1 yr ago+0.2%

Top ETF (by 10d flow)RSPU

Thesis

Utilities went from mildly leading SPY a year ago to a 7.4% drawdown while SPY rose 3.7% — the sharpest relative-strength reversal in the entire scan at 11.3pp. Two drivers stack: a 10-year yield backup pressuring rate-sensitive dividend proxies, and reversal of the 2025 AI-datacenter power-demand narrative as utility commissions in multiple states push back on industrial rate hikes. All five most-liquid utility ETFs show net outflows over the last 10 trading days; XLU alone shed $1.26B and even the equal-weight RSPU registered net outflow. Nothing is being accumulated here. The bid that carried utilities through 2025's power-narrative peak has broken cleanly.

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Utilities

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