Unlock stock picks and a broker-level newsfeed that powers Wall Street.
'Stay overweight US equities,' BlackRock's Chaudhuri says

In This Article:

The market (^GSPC, ^IXIC, ^DJI) showed mixed results on Wednesday, with tech stocks outperforming despite concerns over a potential economic slowdown.

BlackRock's Americas chief investment and portfolio strategist Gargi Chaudhuri joins Market Domination Overtime hosts Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton to discuss the importance of staying overweight US equities and focusing on quality large caps, and the benefits of building a diversified portfolio in response to global market dynamics.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination Overtime here.

00:00 Speaker A

government firings and folks are wondering, could the economy slow? Maybe we'll even tilt into a recession. We've seen this sell off, but you say you're telling your clients, you know what? You need to stay overweight US equities here. How come?

00:19 Speaker B

Yeah, so we are talking about staying overweight US equities, but where is really important. So, we are talking about some of the large caps and the quality parts of the market. We've obviously, as you pointed out, Josh, correctly, there's been a wall of worries, but I think anyone that's expecting a recession, I think it's a little bit too, that fear of recession at this juncture is a little bit too early. We just haven't seen that in the data that we've gotten so far. So yes, a slowdown, but yet we have to remember where the strength still is underpinning in the economy. And this is a services economy that is still growing at a little bit lower than 2%, but nowhere near the zero. So for now, quality parts of the market, we're telling investors to stay to our tickers like Q U A L, which gives you that sector neutral approach to quality companies that have that strong cash flow.

02:21 Speaker A

We have talked to a lot of investors right now who, you know, we're looking globally at a relative, on a relative basis and saying, okay, the US might be fine, but Europe maybe has more upside down. We've already seen that, you know, catch a bid. China might have more upside right now. How are you thinking about some of those issues?

03:00 Speaker B

Absolutely. So that's been the big story of this year. I mean, outside of the pullback that we've had or every, uh, this, this month, uh, the big story has been the outperformance of the rest of the world. And this is why, frankly, this is why we tell investors to build this diversified portfolio even when we wrote our, uh, year ahead outlook, which came out in January. We talked a lot about this exceptionalism in the US, which doesn't just mean US stocks. It just means focusing on the AI story. It means focusing on earnings growth, which of course is still even to this day, coming largely from large cap US, but looking at corners of again, international quality, international dividend, and doing so, especially now, given the rally that we've seen with active management, really looking at those stock pickers that can look at certain parts of defensives in, in Germany and so on.

04:37 Speaker A

We got that CPI print this morning, right? Cooler than expected. I think investors sort of breathed kind of a collective sigh of relief there. What did, what did you make of that print? And what do you think the Fed made of it?

05:05 Speaker B

Yeah, so a couple of things that I was thinking about. The first one was just a reassurance for the market that January was a one-off, that this wasn't a reacceleration of inflation. The second thing that I took away was, especially as it pertains to the Fed, they've talked a lot about that core X shelter component or core services X housing component, and that's softened from a very strong print in January to a 0.2 in February. And I think they'll be very reassured by that. Also, when we look at just the services component, that's coming down to a trend like 0.3 as opposed to the 0.5. So a couple of things there that I think the Fed and investors alike are going to be quite happy about, but I do still want to caution that inflation is still sticky. We're still at core 3.1%, headline 2.8. This is still a very sticky inflation regime, and we're telling investors actually inflation linked bonds, especially in the front end of the curve, something like an STIP that gives you that very front end real rate exposure makes a lot of sense in your portfolios for the next couple of months.