How to trade the S&P 500 after the sell-off, according to the pros
Is this week’s volatility in U.S. stocks a buying opportunity? How can the S & P 500 be traded? Those are some questions that might be on investors’ minds as the S & P 500 and the Nasdaq both tumbled this week — on declines in tech and other stocks — with both indexes on Wednesday diving to a low not seen since 2022. Those losses continued on Thursday , with the S & P 500 closing at 5,399.22 and the Nasdaq finishing at 17,181.72. Markets turned around on Friday , but overall still declined from last week. The S & P 500 lost 0.83% for the week, and the Nasdaq declined around 2% in the same period. “Recently we’ve had extra focus on US politics and higher chance of a Trump presidency that has driven a rotation into smaller caps as well as driving concerns around potential incremental trade war impacts on Taiwanese semi exports and further China AI restrictions,” Richard Clode, tech portfolio manager at Janus Henderson, said in a Friday note. “There has also been a growing debate on the sustainability of AI infrastructure capex without a return on that capex from incremental AI revenues and profits,” he said. But he said that’s “just a timing issue” as capital expenditure always precedes returns, and he’s already seeing an “acceleration of growth” in Google search and cloud, for example. “While there has been increased volatility of late we wouldn’t say there has been any major incremental change of outlook from companies in early reporting to date,” he added. Paul Christopher, head of global market strategy at Wells Fargo Investment Institute, believes that the S & P 500 will get to 5,250 or 5,300 by year-end, but his outlook is a lot more bullish for 2025 — his target for the index is around 5,800. That would represent upside of around 6.2% from Friday’s close. While Christopher said he went neutral on large-cap tech last June, now he would be looking to go back to large-cap tech “if we get an attractive enough price going forward.” “We could be looking at some buying opportunities next week and that sector potentially,” he said. Brian Stutland, portfolio manager at Equity Armor Investments, said he would wait for “full panic” before buying into the market. He told CNBC’s ” Street Signs Asia ” on Thursday that “there might be a sense that it’s now time to buy” amid the panic in last week’s selloff. “However, when we get into a massive sell off like we saw today. I’m sure there’ll be some sort of rally. I probably would be more of — in the short term — seller of rallies, wait for this thing to come down a little bit,” Stutland said. He’s waiting for the VIX index, a volatility index, to “pop” to levels around 20. The VIX index was last at 16.39 last Friday. “Then that’s where maybe I’m looking to try and find some bargains here for people to sort of buy back into this market,” Stutland said. “We will look to rebalance when sort of we see the full panic in the street. We saw a little bit of that today. So maybe one more time with that and then I’m looking to dip in,” he said Thursday. But Christopher cautioned that the recent rotation from large-cap stocks into small-cap names is something that investors should avoid. “Large caps over small caps. Don’t get baited by this move — stay away from small caps here. Large over smalls, large over mids and U.S. over international within the large cap space,” he told CNBC’s ” Squawk Box Asia ” on Friday. He’s positive on adding stocks in the financials, industrials, health-care and energy sectors. “We think those are good foundational stocks. For the upturn that we’re expecting in the early part of next year, [include] financials to really take advantage of the rate cuts that we see coming from the Fed,” he said. Stutland still believes in the artificial intelligence trade. “I still think the AI play is on. We’re just going [through] some valuation corrections overall in the market as things start to soften a little bit here and [amid] some of the uncertainty or like I said around the election time, that’s going to play into it, definitely hit growth stocks,” he said.
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