Safety on Wall Street - FT.com It has recently felt like the final, slow-motion seconds before a car accident: breaking, skidding, the other car floating closer, a sense of unreality, and the hope that the impact will never come. Saturday's G8 declaration offered no help whatsoever. It is increasingly possible that Greece will exit the eurozone, and if it does the repercussions - barring extremely aggressive action by the European Central Bank - will be hugely nasty. Investors in markets one small ocean away, in the US, seem to think they can slip by unharmed. The S&P 500, for example, is a mere 8 per cent down from its recent peak six weeks ago, and the cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio remains high. Still, a more granular look at the equity market shows that fear is beginning to set in. Of the 20 big-cap ($10bn and over) US and Canadian stocks that have performed best in the recent pullback, six are utilities or their cousins the pipeline companies, according to CapitalIQ data. Many of the others are classic defensives as well: Hershey, Verizon, Kimberly-Clark and so on. Utilities look like the easy trade here. During the last market crash far the best-performing group was consumer staples. But if the goal is to find non-cyclical companies with no exposure to Europe, investors who have bid up Wisconsin Energy or Pembina Pipeline have the right idea. And dividend-paying utilities will benefit if central banks respond to a European crisis by printing money, keeping discount rates low. Remember how little relative outperformance can mean when things get ugly, though: in real money utilities dropped 46 per cent in the last crisis. Unless you have a stock-only mandate, sector allocation during a collapsing market is like deciding whether to use the salad fork or the dinner fork to stab yourself in the eye. The right question may be: how much money belongs in stocks at all?