A strategist who anticipated the 2023 rally says he expects stocks to go nowhere for the rest of the year, while potentially struggling in 2024 as well, as corporate earnings growth fails to live up to Wall Street’s overly optimistic expectations.
Barry Bannister, an equity strategist at Stifel, said in a report shared with MarketWatch late Wednesday that he believes this year’s rally, spurred by relief that a U.S. recession wouldn’t arrive in 2023, has run its course. He also expects the equal-weighted S&P 500 index RSP to beat the traditional capitalization-weighted S&P 500 in the second half.
Apple Inc. AAPL is down 6.6% at $178.19 per share, and Tesla Inc. is down 11.8% at $242 per share. Meanwhile, Nvidia Corp. NVDA , the stock that has benefited perhaps more than any other from the artificial-intelligence boom, has barely budged. That view ended up being correct. Consumer prices rose by just 0.2% in June, according to CPI data, showing inflation ebbed to the slowest pace in two years and slowed more quickly than economists had expected. Investors will receive another update on the state of U.S. inflation Thursday morning.