The Globe and Mail attempts to identify value and growth from Canadian large capitalization companies in its Tuesday edition. The Globe's Craig McGee writes in the Number Cruncher column that following the relative strength seen in the markets in the first quarter, North American equities have checked back somewhat, putting up mixed returns so far in April. In Canada, five of the 11 sectors have declined this month, led lower by health care (down 6.9 per cent), financials (2 per cent) and information technology (1.1 per cent). In the midst of growing uncertainty, investors may be looking to turn their attention to companies of higher quality and lower volatility. Mr. McGee only considered companies with a market cap greater than $5-billion and with the best mix of: return on equity; forward price-to-earnings ratio; low five-year price beta (a measure of relative volatility where values less than one suggest less volatility than the market and higher than one suggest more volatility); three-month consensus EPS estimate revision (cannot be worse than minus 5 per cent). Quality large-cap stocks are Fortis, Open Text, Canadian National Railway, Canadian Utilities and Canadian Tire.