The Winning Stock Funds This Time Werent Tech. They Were Energy.

At the beginning of the year, if I’d had to guess what sector of the stock market would outperform all others, the easy answer would have been technology.Yet that’s not what happened for fund investors in the three months through September.Tech stock funds tracked by Morningstar dropped 1.4 percent, which really wasn’t too bad in a quarter with losses nearly everywhere you looked.Instead, the big winner was energy.The average U.S.

energy stock fund rose 11.6 percent for the quarter — a truly splendid return compared with a decline of 1.8 percent, on average, for domestic stock funds and a loss of 2.2 percent for the average taxable bond fund.International stock funds fared poorly, too, with a loss of 0.6 percent, on average.

Municipal bond funds in the United States, which are typically sheltered from some state and local taxes, were even worse, averaging a decline of 5.6 percent.What changed things in the stock and bond markets in those months was mainly the war with Iran, which drove up the prices of oil, gas, refined fuel and other energy products and contributed mightily to an interest-rate surge that has disrupted the financial world.Even artificial intelligence stocks faltered for a while, though they have been rebounding this month, propelling the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 stock indexes to new highs this week.The weak stretch in the markets is a reminder of how difficult it is to make consistent, accurate forecasts about particular sectors or asset classes, especially over short periods.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe....