The big market benchmarks are now within sight of recapturing the record levels they left behind last year. At that moment, the 2022 bear will finally be dead and the new bull will be triumphant . . . but as you know, “the stock market” is only an abstract collection of a lot of individual stocks. There’s always a bear somewhere and a bull somewhere else.

Start with the bears. Consumer discretionary stocks are still 21% below their COVID-era peak. They’ve come back a long, long way but even after their 35% recovery they just haven’t overcome the terrible gravity of Amazon (AMZN) and especially Tesla (TSLA).

Remember when TSLA was a $400 stock? If you believe in Elon Musk, buy and hold. Otherwise, buy every other consumer stock and skip the giants.

Not even the financials are doing that badly. Granted, that’s a sector that still has 13% left to go before it recovers its COVID peak, but I prefer to think of that story as one of relative opportunity rather than a no-fly zone.

The banks have easy upside to capture. It might take a few weeks or months, but they’ll overcome the last bear market shadow and get back to work at some point.

Likewise, the commodity producers, healthcare and defensive consumer plays are only one 10% correction away from record territory. Communications and utilities are closer to relapsing into the bear zone. Want momentum? You know where to go and what to avoid.

The industrials, on the other hand, look a little overdone.

And as I write this, technology is now back in record territory. There’s no bear shadow at all weighing on Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL). This is where the boom is.

A boom will run as long as it can. If the news gets better, the stocks rally deeper and deeper into the record zone. It takes a slowdown to get them to come back down to earth.

I don’t see bad news for AAPL and MSFT. NVDA has probably had its moment for the next few months, but nobody’s forcing you to buy that stock.

And when you drill down into small tech stocks, you’ll find some amazing charts hidden behind the giants. Moral: even a hot sector has relative sweet and sour spots. Stick to the sweet and you’ll do fine.