‘Fearful’ Investors Are Reluctant to Sound All-Clear on U.S. Stocks

(Bloomberg) -- With American equities extending the torrid rebound from Monday’s rout, investors burned by one of the fastest drops of the bull market are debating if the worst is over.

The S&P 500 rallied more than 1% Thursday and is close to wiping out the damage caused by the biggest one-day sell-off of the year. The equity benchmark is still down more than 3% from its record as the effects from Donald Trump’s escalation of his trade war with China linger. Faced with the prospect of fresh tariffs taking hold in three weeks, here’s what Wall Street’s saying as markets enter what is normally a bumpy time of year:

Bob Phillips, managing principal at Spectrum Management Group

“I’d like to be optimistic, and yet investors are leery and fearful. We expect that the market will continue to climb the ‘wall of worry,’ so investors should be prepared to buy the dips at some point over the next few months. I wouldn’t suggest wading in now for two reasons: 1. A September 1st deadline for new tariffs on China. 2. Entering a seasonally weak period for the market.”

Tom Essaye, a former trader who founded “The Sevens Report” newsletter

“The worst of it may be over but, I’d be surprised if the pullback is over. I think we’ll go back and likely take a look at some of this week’s lows simply because the issues that have really been the underlying causes of this pullback haven’t been resolved. What I mean by that is everybody is looking at the Fed, they’re looking at U.S.-China trade but really the core issue is economic growth. The Fed not cutting rates enough just increases chances that growth is going to stall, at least from a market standpoint. And the U.S.-China tariff issue and yuan devaluation, that just puts greater headwinds on global growth. Those two headlines, those two events, are really kind of like the symptoms of this pullback, which is worries about global growth.”

Luke Tilley, chief economist at Wilmington Trust Investment Advisors

“The market stabilization is encouraging but clearly investors are concerned about the prospect of the trade war getting more intense and the tariffs coming. Clearly, the Treasury market is pretty concerned about growth going forward. We have a slowing economy by multiple measures at risk of getting hit by something like more tariffs and the possibility of something like that may generate a really bad market outcome, possibly a recession.”

Tom Plumb, portfolio manager at Plumb Balanced Fund in Madison, Wisconsin

“It’s still a market for stocks. But there’s no question that the headwinds, the headlines are increasing the volatility and we’ll have that for the foreseeable future,” he said. “There’s a lot of things out there that are going continue to impact us. Meanwhile, the United States is still the best economy in the world and I think stock prices are not that out of line. We still think that all the pieces are there for the secular bull market to continue.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Olivia Rinaldi in New York at orinaldi1@bloomberg.net;Vildana Hajric in New York at vhajric1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeremy Herron at jherron8@bloomberg.net, Rita Nazareth

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.