U.S. consumer stocks echo dot-com era performance

U.S. consumer stocks are behaving as they did during the Internet bubble of the 1990s. The S&P 500 Consumer Discretionary Index, including automakers, media companies and retailers, closed Wednesday at its highest level relative to the food, beverage and tobacco companies in the S&P 500 Consumer Staples Index since March 2000, when the dot-com era peaked. The indexes’ ratio was less than 3 percent from a record, set the same month. “That trend is not yet showing signs of coming to an end,” Andrew Adams, a strategist at Raymond James Financial Inc., wrote Wednesday in a report with a similar chart.