Four safe -- safer -- sectors

Some sectors have started to find some balance, even while others continue their plummet The New York Times reports. The paper quotes Jeffrey N. Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financial in Boston: “The market is starting to sort between the winners and the losers, rather than pushing everything down as if it were a monolithic asset,” he says.

Health care funds, long considered resistant to desperate economic times, rose 3 percent, and mutual funds rose 2 percent, the paper writes. Energy and utilities funds fell 1 percent and 3 percent, respectively, but still beat the over 8 percent decline for Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index this year.