By Luke Kawa
(Bloomberg) --New year, same diet.
Investors are betting that two of 2017’s most important and intertwined trends -- synchronized global growth and a weakening U.S. dollar -- will gather steam in 2018.
The Industrial Select SPDR Fund (ticker XLI) topped the U.S. equity exchange-traded fund leaderboard in the first week of the year, attracting $1.75 billion in inflows.
XLI hasn’t received inflows this large since the week Donald Trump prevailed in the U.S. election, which spurred expectations that pro-growth proposals like infrastructure spending would be initiated before too long.
Industrials are considered to be a cyclical sector; that is, a segment of the market acutely sensitive to global economic activity. A weaker dollar tends to boost the prospects of exporters.
The ETF outperformed the S&P 500 Index in 2017, and includes the dog of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, General Electric Co.. It also has that gauge’s top two standouts: Boeing Co. and Caterpillar Inc., which posted gains of 89 percent and 70 percent last year, respectively.
To contact the reporter on this story: Luke Kawa in New York at [email protected] To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeremy Herron at [email protected] Dave Liedtka, Joanna Ossinger