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I just got back from the Money Show conference in Las Vegas where I delivered a couple of presentations. I gave one on the state of the biotech sector and another one on where I am finding value in what I believe to be at least a slightly overbought market with no earnings growth to speak of.

I found my audience was a bit more somber than in years past; although, they seem to be maintaining their resiliency despite the challenging market of the last year and a half. This contrasted to the mood at the nearby SALT conference in the Bellagio which is an annual hedge fund confab. After years of underperforming the market and seeing an increasing out-migration of both governmental and corporate pension funds, this meeting of the financial “Masters of the Universe” was almost a wake. At least I hear it was, I think my invite might have got lost in the mail this year.

All kidding aside, it has been a rough go for both the retail and professional investor ever since the Federal Reserve drew down its last “quantitative easing” program in the fall of 2014. Since then, the market has gone basically sideways with more stocks down than up. The dollar has appreciated almost 20% since the summer of 2014, producing a major headwind for the earnings within the S&P 500 which recently posted its fourth straight decline in earnings on a year-over-year basis.

The energy sector has been a tar pit that has left many investors with deep losses since oil began its descent from over $100 a barrel nearly two years ago. Even income investors have been brutalized as they leap into what they thought were “safe” yields provided via master limited partnerships (MLPs) within the energy sector.

Small caps have significantly underperformed the overall market over this time frame as well. This is despite little exposure to the strong dollar or tepid overseas demand. They have simply been hit as sentiment on the market has decidedly gone into a “risk off” mode and as volatility in the high-yield credit markets spiked severely to start 2016. The latter has also caused most real estate investment trusts to substantially underperform the market since last summer as well, despite the yield on ten-year treasuries remaining below two percent.