February 2024 Stock Market Outlook

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So, I see little reason to think, given that these long-term forces remain in place that we’re going to reverse the trend of low interest rates that was in place throughout the entire 2010s. I think right now markets are deceived by the strength of the near-term economy. I would just note of that, this past quarter, I think Alphabet GOOGL and Meta META were the only two that still had been able to post gains at this point.

Whereas when it’s trading below 1, that means it’s trading at a discount to that composite. So, as of a week-and-a-half ago, when we did our calculations, we noted that the market was trading at a price to fair value of 0.92. So, that represents an 8% discount to our fair value estimates. Mortgage rates have more than doubled in the past year as the Federal Reserve pushed ahead with its unprecedented campaign of hiking interest rates in order to tame soaring inflation. The combination of the central bank’s rate hikes, investor’s concerns about a recession and mixed economic news has made mortgage rates volatile over the past several months. After a strong performance in 2023, the S&P 500’s bullish momentum has continued in January.

  1. To ensure that put sellers can fulfill their obligation to buy the underlying stock upon exercise, many brokers require investors to have a margin account with a certain level of buying power to sell puts.
  2. In fact, the IBD market outlook switched to «confirmed uptrend» four times amid rally attempts, but each time they petered out.
  3. A lot of that is due to the extra yield that you get because of the corporate credit spread.
  4. For instance, the 10-year Treasury currently pays less than the 3-month Treasury, meaning that portion of the yield curve is inverted.

That is, making large, high-conviction bets on eventual outperformers is the way to go, assuming those decisions bear fruit. “Picking winning stocks is easier said than done,” wrote Jack Shannon, a Morningstar senior equities analyst who conducted the study. You might think that professional money managers are highly skilled at picking stocks that outperform, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. For the fourth year, Bloomberg News has collated and condensed the key views from dozens of investment outlooks and presents more than 500 of them below.

Since the end of December, the S&P 500 has gained 2.96% compared to only a 0.3% increase in consensus earnings estimates for 2024. He looked at nine prior milestone breakthroughs for the S&P 500 spanning several decades and concluded that stocks tend to continue rising. Of the last nine that he examined https://forexhero.info/ (when the S&P 500 broke through 100 through 500, then 1,000 through 4,000), the index usually kept going, posting an average return of 10.4% over the subsequent 12 months. Investors seem to get excited by the publicity, with many becoming fearful of missing out on the rally, Turnquist said.

The global stock rally powered ahead as Nvidia Corp.’s bullish outlook rekindled the artificial-intelligence mania and data showed the world’s largest economy is still going strong. Wall Street analysts are expecting earnings to rebound in the first half of 2024, projecting a 4.6% increase in S&P 500 earnings in the first quarter and another 9.4% growth in the second quarter. Even the presidential election cycle might give a further boost to keep the market moving higher. This is the tendency of stocks to rally during presidential-election years and years like 2023 that precede them. One favorable sign was the Standard & Poor’s 500 index closing above 5,000 for the first time on Feb. 9.

Zacks #1 Rank Top Movers

So, with Snowflake, I do think that is a good play on artificial intelligence. They’re a data management provider that hosts enterprise data on which the artificial intelligence models continuous delivery maturity model are run. So, we do think that one has a good platform for future growth tied to AI. Looking at the individual sectors here, I’d note that the technology sector has sold off.

Nevertheless, Chinese exports grew at a double-digit pace in May and came in ahead of forecasts. If the country continues to ramp up its exports, it would be a major catalyst for stocks as supply chains ease. Nicholas Burns, the American envoy in Beijing, has said the policy could drag out into the «beginning months of 2023.» But Ryan believes energy stocks may need to pull back to stop them from overheating.

I mentioned earlier, looking at the bottom chart that, the effects of Fed rate hikes that have happened over the last year or so have yet to fully play out. And in one way we can see that is in terms of bank lending. It has been since the start of this year, but that’s a very much delayed reaction to the impact of rate hikes. Growth in year-over-year terms is still in positive territory, including for commercial real estate.

Now that’s been driven mostly by semiconductor manufacturing along with clean energy such as new battery plants for electric vehicles. All of that stimulated by the legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act and such, and the Chips Act that we’ve seen over the last year that has provided very lucrative subsidies for manufacturing plants in these areas. So, all of that is having the desired effect of creating a surge in manufacturing investment and that will probably plateau from here on out. So, the effect on the growth rate—we won’t see continued incremental effect on the GDP growth rate from here on out as things plateau at an elevated level of building. And then, we’ll start to see this likely run in the opposite direction sometime in probably 2025 or 2026 when these projects start to wrap up.

After Nvidia’s latest blowout, here are 20 AI stocks expected to rise as much as 44%

The author or authors do not own shares in any securities mentioned in this article. Zacks Rank Home – Evaluate your stocks and use the Zacks Rank to eliminate the losers and keep the winners. The enterprise refresh cycle, new subscription model, Azure and strength in Gaming segment will continue to generate sizeable cash flows. Its expanding cloud footprint and strengthening presence in the smart home market remain noteworthy.

Within consumer defensive stocks, we highlight Tyson Foods, Estee Lauder, and Kellogg. Morningstar’s top underpriced analyst picks of the quarter. Coinbase, Nvidia, Palantir, and other tech names dominate the list of the year’s best stocks. Investors went into 2023 worried about inflation and expecting a recession by the second half of the year. The company’s dominance in the China’s e-commerce market, retail strength, and solid growth opportunities in international market are positives.

All 30 Dow stocks were higher, with the energy and financial sectors posting the biggest gains. Instead, the economy remained rock-solid in 2023 despite aggressive rate hikes and elevated inflation. Economic growth actually accelerated last year, supported by strong (albeit slower) increases in consumer spending and business investments. The economy is currently projected to expand at an annualized 2.9% in the first quarter of 2024, above the 10-year average of 2.5%. In the mega-caps where they had come into the year being overvalued to star-rated, pretty much all of these have well underperformed the market year to date.

CFRA Chief Investment Strategist Sam Stovall cites a clear precedent for the stock market retracing its losses. Many factors are at play, and investors must be ready to protect themselves in what is sure to be a choppy and volatile market. With the risk of a recession rising, things could get worse for the stock market before they get better. The stock market took a pounding in the first half of 2022. Some investors sell puts to generate income from a stock that they think will rise in the future.

U.S. Equity Market and Fair Value Estimates

With the numbers now in, bulls are calculating Nvidia’s new price-to-earnings ratio, or how much investors are paying for future growth. Put another way, the firm’s profits have been growing faster than its shares. With the S&P 500 now back at all-time highs, some analysts are growing concerned about how much growth is already priced into stock prices at their current level, particularly in the high-flying technology sector.

Jeffrey Buchbinder, chief equity strategist for LPL Financial, says investors should keep their expectations in check given the S&P 500’s elevated valuation. Jerry Klein, managing director at Treasury Partners, says investors are way too optimistic about interest rate cuts in 2024. Adding to investor optimism, the Federal Reserve has made tremendous progress on the inflation front in the past two years, which means the Fed could be positioned to finally begin cutting interest rates in the first half of 2024. “The S&P 500 has set six new all-time highs in 2024, all in January. That works out to an annualized rate of 72 new highs,” says Sam Stovall, Chief Investment Strategist of CFRA Research.

That’s been a sector that we’ve seen a lot of volatility thus far this year. I think it was in June, I think that’s when we moved to a market weight from an overweight in growth. And then, in our last quarterly outlook, we then moved to an underweight as growth was starting to get too high on a relative value.

Dow, S&P 500 surge to records after Nvidia’s blockbuster earnings spark global rally

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