Fisher Investments on Industrials: Global Industrials Benchmarks

What's a benchmark? What does it do, and why is it necessary? Fisher Investments defines a benchmark as your guide for building a stock portfolio. You can use any well-constructed index as a benchmark—please reference examples in Table 4.1 of Fisher Investments on Industrials. By studying a benchmark's makeup, investors can assign expected risk and return to make underweight and overweight decisions for each industry. This is just as true for a sector as it is for the broader stock market, and there are many potential Industrials sector benchmarks to choose from. (In Fisher Investments on Industrials, benchmarks will be further explored with the top-down method in Chapter 7.)

Benchmarks Differences
What does the Industrials investment universe look like? It depends on the benchmark, so choose carefully. The US Industrials sector looks very different from that of Europe, Japan, and emerging markets (EM). Please reference Table 4.1 of Fisher Investments on Industrials, which shows major domestic and international benchmark indexes and the percentage weight of each sector.