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Financials — Historical Charts and Data

Every Financials chart, valuation metric, drawdown record, and constituent breakdown from History of Market. 9 panels, refreshed daily.

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§ V

S5FINL · Bloomberg BEst Forward PE — Thirty years of Financials forward PE Bloomberg's BEst series records monthly forward PE for the Financials GICS sub-index (S5FINL) back to 1996. The sector has spent most of three decades inside an 11–18× corridor — structurally a notch below technology. The 38× print in 2008-12 is not a valuation top; it's the accounting consequence of sector-wide writedowns briefly pushing the EPS denominator toward zero during the financial crisis. Current reading, long-run mean, and historical percentile sit on the metric strip below the chart.

§ I

XLF · 1998 to present — XLF's twenty-seven-year arc Listed December 1998, same vintage as XLK. The deepest mark on this curve is 2008 — a cumulative -84% drawdown, the deepest in the sector's entire modern history. XLF · Annual Return — XLF's year-by-year ledger Twenty-seven complete years. 2008 alone took -55%; 2009's +17% bounce was nowhere near enough to recover. 2023's regional-bank scare printed -16% intrayear before closing positive. XLF · Return Distribution — Twenty-seven years of annual returns, binned Mean slightly below the S&P, but the left tail is extreme — the signature of a 'crisis sector': most years tick gently upward, but when something breaks, it's industry-wide.

§ II

XLF · Intrayear DD vs Full Year — Financials' intrayear depth Average intrayear drawdown is close to the S&P's, but 2008, 2009, 2020 and 2023 all concentrated their volatility in this sector.

§ III

Financials · 2008 Anatomy — 2008, the plague year of US Financials Five top financial institutions disappeared in that single year — Bear, Lehman, Wamu, Wachovia, AIG. Five others survived, and most expanded by absorbing the fallen. This is the true narrative core of this ETF.

§ IV

FRED 2y-10y · XLF — The yield-curve × XLF causal chain Top: the 2y-10y Treasury spread from 1976 to today; the shaded bands are 'inversions'. Bottom: XLF's trailing 12-month return. Banks earn the spread — the curve moves first, the sector follows, typically with a 3-9 month lag. GICS · 2023-03-17 Reshuffle — March 2023: Visa and Mastercard became financial stocks overnight S&P and MSCI reclassified payments-tech — V, MA, PYPL and others — from Information Technology into Financial Services. XLF picked up ~12% of new weight in a single day. Reading XLF's long curve, this 2023 seam is the second one to step around. XLF · Top Holdings — XLF's top holdings BRK.B + JPM together ~23%; V + MA together ~13%. Calling BRK.B a 'financial' is a stretch — but GICS classifies it that way, and XLF follows.