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All right, let's get more on the latest market moves. Want to welcome in Jill Carey Hall, uh, Bank of America Securities senior US equity strategist and head of US Small and Midcap Strategy. Jill, it's good to see you. It's been a minute, so appreciate you joining us. So, I guess I'll I'll steal Josh's question to start you out here and kind of ask, now what, right? We've seen sort of the cooling of the worst case scenario fears around some of the recent economic data. Now we're kind of back where we were. Now what? What are people going to be queuing off of?

Yeah, thanks for having me. I mean, I think this is an environment where investors want to be selective. We don't necessarily see more upside to the S&P 500 index level. We've we've had a 5400 year end target. Um, I think this is an environment where you want to pick your spots within the market. I think we're in a backdrop where as we saw this earnings season, earnings for a lot of the the big tech stocks, the big hyperscalers who are starting to spend a lot on on CAPEX, uh, their earnings are are starting to slow, which which consensus expects will continue, whereas the rest of the market, you know, the the other 493 stocks in the S&P 500, their earnings growth has has been turning positive and is starting to pick up. Um, so we do like the the equal weighted S&P 500 over the the cap weighted index. We've seen more upside there. And I think if we're in an environment where the Fed is projected to cut interest rates this year, which which we similarly expect, then, you know, equity income stocks, dividend stocks start to look more attractive. Um, so I think there's there's opportunities in in a lot of pockets of the market, um, even if we don't necessarily expect upside at the S&P 500 index level.

And and Jill, sort of to that point, I mean, it seems like two weeks ago, your your team would have had a similar stance, right? That there was probably going to be a broadening sort of that that 493. We've had this influx of news over the last two weeks and we've sort of shifted from, oh boy, we need to price and recession risk to actually we priced in recession risk too far. I mean, are we kind of just back at the same point we were at two weeks ago as investors? Like should we be thinking about this market differently now than we were to start the month?

Well, I think, you know, one thing we've been expecting is that volatility is going to be likely during this seasonal period. Um, you know, usually in presidential election years, you do see the VIX rise about 25% from July to November. Um, and and so, you know, we we were also in an environment where based on the slope of the yield curve, that's typically been a good predictor of what happens to volatility with with a leading relationship. So that was also suggesting we could see volatility, you know, move up off of lows starting in the second half of this year. So, you know, I think we when you look at history, it would suggest that 5% pullbacks in the S&P 500 happen on average about three times a year. Um, we hadn't seen one since April. So all in all, I think it's an environment where volatility could could continue in the near term and and selectivity within the market makes sense. Um, you know, I I think we we certainly saw big moves in in small caps and and that's an area I look closely at as well, but but that's one where I think the earnings picture in addition to just the macroeconomic picture is something that a lot of investors are focusing on right now.