This is important to understand given that you must know your stock's peers in any given business. You must know all competitors to your stock to begin to predict its price, and whether it is headed lower or higher.
SECTOR: A Sector is a general category describing the overall type of business conducted. INDUSTRY: The Industry (or subcategory) within a sector more specifically defines the business that company is in. Click image below to see COMPLETE LIST of Sectors and Sub-Industries: EXCLUSIVE TOOL (snapshot shown above): To see a list of all Sectors and Industries within each sector, we have put together a special summary for you in one place, and we also provide you with two examples of competing stock examples listed for each sector and industry, click image above, or click here to see complete list, including two company examples in each industry...
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Again, the reason why this step is critical is to identify your company's position in a designated Sector, and then the subcategory of that sector, the Industry. Once you know your company, you can click on the Industry link (in this case, "Semiconductor - Broad Line," and see similar companies in that subcategory. That leads you into our next step, Step 140, to identify and analyze your company's competitors.
After we click on "Industry" from the sidebar, we see that Intel is a member of the following:
SECTOR: Intel is in the "Technology" sector.
INDUSTRY: Within the Technology sector, it indicates that Intel is in the Industry subcategory, "Semiconductor - Broad Line."
After we went on to click the Industry link for "Semiconductor - Broad Line" we find that they list the Top 5 industry performers (by Market Capitalization) in this Industry subcategory, which helps us to find these "direct" competitors to Intel, that we learn more about in the next step... Hint: The five top performing companies indicated are:
Intel (INTC): #1 by Market Capitalization in this Industry list (i.e., $130 billion market cap)
Texas Instruments (TXN) - ($33 billion market cap)
STMicroelectronics (STM) - ($8 billion market cap)
Analog Devices (ADI) - ($9 billion market cap)
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) - ($7 billion market cap)
More about this in Step 140...
Multiple Industry Subcategories? Note that some companies can participate in multiple, "crossover" industries. For example, Apple (AAPL) started out as primarily a computer company (and was actually called Apple Computer, Inc. until January, 2007, when it changed its name to Apple, Inc., to better reflect its more diverse product line). Today, most of us know Apple in several industry categories, including computers (desktops, laptops, and now tablets) phones, and portable music devices and cameras with more likely to come. The lesson is that you should find out all of the possible industry sub-categories that can affect your company's stock.
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