Help Wanted: Stock Market Leadership

In any offensive -- be it war, football, or trying to make money in the stock market -- if leaders falter, chaos ensues.

Monday's session had all the signature sloppiness of a wandering market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average briefly dipped into negative territory year to date, but came out of the hole to end down 0.7% for the day, closing at 12,477.16 vs. its intraday low of 12,450.89.

The S&P 500 finished down 0.5%, closing at 1422.95, and the Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.8% Monday to finish at 2431.07.

The Dow is now up only 0.1% in 2007, the S&P has returned 0.3% and the Nasdaq, after eating away at its year-to-date returns in the past week, remains up 0.6% thus far.

Anxiety about earnings season, combined with the oil and energy selloff, has left many large-cap stocks in the red for the year.

Within several industry groups, the leaders by market cap are posting negative returns thus far in 2007 (see table below).

"That makes for a lot of people's balloons deflating," says Margaret Patel, portfolio manager at Pioneer Investments, which has $6 billion in assets under management.

"Something with a market cap of $40 million may be breaking your heart, but it doesn't even make the paper. Those [large-cap] names can jostle people."

To the list below, add household names like Home Depot(HD Quote), Apple(AAPL Quote), Intel(INTC Quote), Motorola(MOT Quote) and Pfizer(PFE Quote).

They may not be down on the year, but each is dealing with regulatory investigations and/or providing cautious earnings guidance. Meanwhile, IBM (IBM Quote) crawled back to break-even for the year thanks to Monday's 1% rise.

Company	Industry	Market Cap	YTD performance (%)
Exxon Mobil (XOM:NYSE)	Integrated oil & gas	$428.9 bln	-4.70%
United Parcel Service (UPS:NYSE)	Air delivery & freight	$80.5 bln	-1%
Caterpillar (CAT:NYSE)	Farm & construction machinery	$38.6 bln	-4.90%
Cisco Systems (CSCO:Nasdaq)	Network & communication devices	$162.1 bln	-2.90%
General Electric (GE:NYSE)	Conglomerates	$380.9 bln	-1.20%
AT&T (T:NYSE)	Domestic telecom services	$134.8 bln	-1.80%
UnitedHealth Group (UNH:NYSE)	Health Care Plans	$71.4 bln	-2.80%
eBay (EBAY:Nasdaq)	Internet software & services	$41.3 bln	-2.50%
Advantest (ATE:NYSE)	Semiconductor equipment & materials	$41.8 bln	-11%
Boeing (BA:NYSE)	Aerospace/Defense	$67.5 bln	-3.40%
Source: Yahoo! Finance