From one corner of JPMorgan Chase & Co., the bank’s stock-averse chief market strategist, Marko Kolanovic, has issued a consistent drumbeat of warnings about stretched technology valuations and the risk that high interest rates will stall the global economy.
Over at the bank’s trading desk, they’ve reached a different conclusion: It’s a good time to buy US equities.
The latter team, which includes Head of US Market Intelligence Andrew Tyler, walked back their cautious January stock call in a note to clients. They said their prior stance was “overly conservative,” based on worries about earnings and a pullback from last year’s massive rally. The trading desk said it’s now “tactically bullish.”
“That mea culpa aside, what has changed? Megacap tech earnings whose stocks prices are in the process of de-coupling from bond yields,” Tyler and his colleagues wrote. “Also, the macro story continues to reveal an economy that keeps pace at an above-trend pace with no material signs of falling below trend in the near-term.”
They expect that strength to translate into positive revenue growth and for big technology names to propel the S&P 500 Index — which has hit record after record this year — even higher, just “at a potentially slower pace.”
The optimism from JPMorgan’s traders breaks with the view of the bank’s research team, including Kolanovic and Dubravko Lakos-Bujas, the head of US equity and quantitative strategy. They have been contrarians this year, sounding the alarm on stocks due to a confluence of forces: the risk of inflation resurfacing, an economic slowdown due to high rates, geopolitical risks, and overly optimistic earnings expectations.
But the stock market has defied Kolanovic’s expectations for two consecutive years and counting. The strategist was bullish throughout most of 2022’s equities rout and maintained a pessimistic outlook across last year’s 24% rally in the S&P 500, cutting his recommended stock allocation over concerns of an economic downturn. US stocks have extended that advance this year.
Even as other Wall Street strategists have ratcheted up their outlooks for US stocks, JPMorgan has maintained the lowest year-end target among its peers, calling for the index to drop to 4,200 by the end of 2024. The US stock benchmark was trading around 4,940 on Tuesday, above the average sell-side forecast of 4,874 tracked by Bloomberg.
The in-house divide at JPMorgan echoes those at a handful of other firms, illustrating the difficulty of predicting where the stock market is headed. That uncertainty stems in part from the surprisingly resilient economy, which has recently prodded traders to dial back their expectations for how much the Federal Reserve will ease monetary policy this year.
After broadly missing the 2023 stock rally due to concerns about a potential recession that flared as the year began, Wall Street forecasters on the whole have been turning increasingly bullish. Goldman Sachs, RBC Capital Markets, and UBS have already raised their 2024 year-end calls for the S&P 500 since publishing them late last year. On Monday, Bank of America Corp.’s Savita Subramanian told Bloomberg Television that hers — at 5,000 — was probably too low.
Even Morgan Stanley’s Mike Wilson, a staunch equity bear, has turned more positive, saying he expects the rally to broaden and advising investors to stick with large-cap, quality growth stocks that have the potential to outperform in all possible macroeconomic scenarios.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.