I'm Elena Casas.

Our sector today is health care, and our guest is Randy Watts, the chief investment officer for O Neill Global Advisors.

With global headlines currently dominated by news of the rollout of various coronavirus vaccines, you might be surprised that stocks in vaccine makers have had Apache year, as has the sector.

Shares in Pfizer, for example, of fared poorly on a trading at about the same level they were a year ago.

Drugmakers in general suffered as people stayed away from hospitals and doctors as the pandemic raged.

But the S and P 500 Healthcare Index includes not only drugmakers, but health insurers and medical supply makers.

Accounts Johnson and Johnson, United Health and Pfizer is the top three holdings.

Three indexes, up a modest 12% over the past year.

So is this a sector investors should be looking at in 2021 with vaccine rollouts underway?

Let's find out with O Neill Global Advisors chief investment officer Randy Watts, Randi.

Thanks for joining us, given the sector's fairly average performance over the last year, why is this something investors should be looking at well, first thanks for having me back.

I hope everything is well in London.

The reason we like health care and you hit on it a little bit at the opening comments is that we believe there's a lot of pent up demand.

Ah, lot of elective surgeries and hospital visits and doctor visits were delayed because of co vid.

And as we come out of this pandemic, we think those we're going to really pick up and lead to better than average revenue and earnings growth for the sector versus the overall market.

You say, though, that there are multiple cross currents to be aware of in health care.

What are those?

Well, we do think you really want to focus on testing medical devices and select areas of Bio Pharma, and the area we would avoid in the US right now is actually managed care so that the Biden administration coming in, they're looking to reassert some elements of the Affordable Care Act, and that could impact the margins of managed care companies like a united health negatively.

So we really want to focus on devices and testing companies like Abbott Labs, who reported this morning and had great numbers they beat on revenues and earnings and raised their guidance for 2021 companies like Intuitive Surgical.

It does robot surgeries.

We think elective surgeries were really going to spike in the second half of the year.

Is the pandemic ends?

And Neo Genomics, which is a company that does testing for both co vid and oncology, given Aled that, then how would you advise investors to approach healthcare?

I would say it is a little bit of a stock picker's market right now.

Uh, the Onley sector in health care that's actually down over the last two months is managed care.

So as I mentioned, we would avoid that we would try to be overexposed to devices and testing.

If you look at health care, it's actually started to pick up recently, so it lagged last year.

This year it's actually going in today's trading up more than the S and P by about 50 basis points.

So we do think this is a sign of things to come, and we do think relative performance is gonna be better as we move through 2021 overall, then his health care by hold or sell.

We think it's a buy.

We think investors should be focusing on growth stocks.

We think there's an awful lot of good news and a lot of the cyclical recovery place.

So we wanna be with secular growers that have new technology that can really and invigorate their revenues.

And we think health care is one of the places you can find that thanks so much for that.

That was Randy Watts of O Neill Global Advisors.

Before I go, then here are some of the top stories in the sector.

President Biden will issue an executive order reopening the nation's online health insurance marketplace that had been shut down by former President Donald Trump.

Americans who can't get health insurance through their employer will be able to sign up from February 15th andan International fight over vaccine supplies intensified on Thursday.

The European Union says it will tighten oversight of exports after around with AstraZeneca on Britain demanded that it received the shots it paid for the US far behind Britain and the United States in rolling out vaccines.

It's scrambling to get supplies as AstraZeneca and other big vaccine makers slow deliveries due to production problems on Germany's vaccine committee, says that AstraZeneca's Cove in 19 vaccine should only be given to people aged 18 to 64.

The recommendation comes only one day ahead of a decision by European regulators On the jab, the committee said there's insufficient data available to assess efficacy for those aged 65 over, and that's your roundup of the health care sector.

I'm Elena Casas, and this is Reuters.