It's the fourth quarter, and the heavily favored Giants are still trailing.
So a sportscaster might report from the sidelines of the stock market, assessing the state of the big-name consumer stocks going into the last three months of 1993.What started as a tough year for the shares of these pillars of the business world hasn't gotten much better as the months passed.
"Growth managers continue to suffer performance problems," said Robert Gay, an analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc.
"Since the high-growth group began performing poorly in the first quarter of 1992, the style has underperformed the Standard & Poor's average by a cumulative 20.6 percent."
Over a span that is fast approaching two years, many investors fleeing the old-line growth stocks have opted instead for "value" stocks in cyclical or out-of-favor industries.
"The gap between value and growth stock performance grew larger in the third quarter," said Paul Greenwood, senior research analyst at Frank Russell Co., a Tacoma, Wash., firm that tracks the performance of various sectors of the market through a series of indexes.
In the July-September period, the Russell 1000 value index, comprised of large companies with the lowest ratios of market price to book value, or theoretical liquidating value, "benefited from a boost in financial services and utility stocks," Greenwood noted.
The Russell 1000 growth index, comprising big stocks with the highest price-to-book ratios, "continued to be hurt by poor performance in health care and consumer staples stocks."
Actually, not all growth stocks have taken a beating. Many small growth issues have been racking up strong gains, helping to lift the composite index of the Nasdaq market to new highs.
The cold-shoulder treatment has been reserved for large companies with major brands in such consumer markets as food, household products and health care.
Prompted partly by the example of price-cutting competition in the cigarette business, talk has spread on Wall Street all year that wary, cost-conscious consumers were turning their backs on many popular brand names, perhaps for good.
"Herd mentality came to a conclusion that generic brands would inherit huge chunks of market share from these old institutional cornerstone markets, putting the squeeze on margins in the process," said Bob Gabele, editor of the CDA Investnet Insiders' Chronicle newsletter in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
But Gabele, along with some other analysts, sees signs that the big consumer stocks might be ready to fare a little better soon.
"A funny thing happened on the way to the debacle," he said. "Insiders steadily accumulated shares in many of these big issues."
"The buying eventually became too broadly based, in many cases, to be attributed to casual bargain-hunting. We figure the answer must lie partially in the fact that new tax legislation has opened a door encouraging big-name companies to get into the restructuring game."
Says George Thompson, a beverage-industry analyst at Prudential Securities, "We believe that some combatants in the consumer sector wars have been wrongly left for dead, their vital signs obscured by the poor performance of the group.
"We definitely expect a few of the survivors to revive to real earnings growth and more predictable earnings.
"But we offer such hope for fewer and fewer companies than was the case in the past decade," Thompson adds. "Consumers continue to place more importance on price and value."
In the view of Ralph Acampora, technical analyst at Prudential, "It now appears that the unloved consumer growth stocks are stabilizing, and even beginning to show signs of renewed leadership potential.
"This change does not negate the positive action of the cyclical stocks - it simply suggests to us that a catch-up by the consumer names is under way."