Robert Brokamp

Despite the fact that AI and tech stocks have grabbed most of the investment headlines in recent memory, the energy sector has actually outperformed the tech sector over the last five years.

Since early February of 2021, the State Street Energy Sector SPDR ETF, ticker XLE, has earned a total return of 169%, compared to 114% for the State Street Technology Sector SPDR ETF, ticker XLK.

And an investment that hasn't had such a great five years is the bond market, which brings us to our next item.

Charlie Bilello of Creative Planning posted on X that the Bloomberg Aggregate Bond Index has spent 66 months below its all-time high set in August of 2020.

It is by far the longest drawdown since the index was launched in 1976.

The next longest drawdown was a dip that began in 1980 that lasted only 16 months.

Of course, bonds pay interest, so the total return of bonds over the past five years has been about flat, maybe a little less.

What explains this poor performance?

Well, the level of rates five years ago.

The yield on the 10-year treasury was 1.1%, driven historically low by the Federal Reserve and the bond market as the world recovered from the pandemic.

The return from bonds over a period of five to 10 years or so is highly correlated to the level of rates at the starting point.

So where are we now?

The yield on the 10-year treasury is 4.3%, which is why most Wall Street firms expect bonds to return between 4% and 5% over the next several years.

And now the number of the week, which is almost 26 years.

That's how long it took Cisco's stock to exceed its dot-com high of $82 reached in March of 2000.

It dropped to as low as $10 a share in the subsequent bear market.

But this past Tuesday, it finally exceeded $82.

While we here at The Motley Fool like to point out that the overall U.S.

stock market has always recovered from a downturn and usually takes only a few years, individual stocks are a different story.

As we've seen with Cisco, it can sometimes take decades, but at least Cisco did recover.