In This Article:
US stock futures (ES=F, NQ=F, YM=F) are mixed Tuesday morning, with the Nasdaq barely on the upside.
Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Josh Schafer joins Morning Brief hosts Madison Mills and Brad Smith to discuss Wall Street strategists revising their US growth outlook. In particular, Citi Group (C) downgraded US equities (^GSPC, ^IXIC, ^DJI) to Neutral.
Uncertainty in economic data, inflation, and growth concerns are also emphasized, with no clear market direction yet in sight.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Morning Brief here.
This post was written by Josh Lynch
For US stock futures this morning, they are mixed now. With the NASDAQ flat, just barely to the upside. We'll see where that holds going into the start of today's trade. The market's meltdown though, to begin the week coincides with a major shift on Wall Street, as strategists rethink the growth outlook for the US economy. Here to discuss this further, we've got Josh Shafer. Josh, one particular takeout from City here, especially kind of leaning into this right now as well.
Yeah, so City's global team is out this morning, Brad, saying that they are moving to a neutral stance on US equities. They actually moved China to an overweight. You've seen this kind of move across a lot of different firms, as far as moving something overseas to overweight and moving US equities to neutral. What you're looking at on your screen right now is GDP forecasts. Those are from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. JP Morgan also moved theirs down. And again, notably, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan moving down their US forecast, moving up their Euro forecast. You take a look at the stock market over the last month, what's been going up, Euro stocks. What's been going down, US stocks. So sort of what's happening here is a little bit of a play to a rate of change, right? You want to be in the area where things are going up, not in the area where things are going down from a growth perspective. And as we see these economic growth forecasts get moved down for the US economy, that has not been the trend over the last year. So we're counter to sort of where we had been. And what I think is important to point out here, I want to highlight this chart from Lori Calvisina over at RBC Capital Markets. It's a look at GDP and how stocks interact under different GDP regimes. What's interesting in this chart is between zero and 2% is when you see stocks fall the most, not when GDP is below 0%. So what is that chart showing us? I would argue it's showing you that the most dangerous time in the market is when the market is pricing in a slowdown, right? Not when the market is, when we've already accepted that we're in a slowdown. Right now, we're starting to price in a little bit of a slowdown. We've moved below that 2% level where stocks normally perform well. And the question is how far down are we going? And quite frankly, I don't think anyone has that exact answer right now. As we always joke, if we did have that exact answer, we'd probably be trading right now, right? But I think that's the key question right now, right, is you're pricing in a slowdown in growth. How bad is the slowdown going to be?
That's such an important chart and points to the need for certainty in the market. And Josh, I found this chart this morning that I want to get your take on here, just to give our viewers a sense of what might happen today, the day after a drop like we saw coming into the start of this week on Monday. The majority of the time you do see the market recovering the following day. You can see a gain of about 1% is going to happen the majority of the time. But of course, there is still a chance that we continue to see selling, and nobody knows where we're going to go from here. What are you looking at? What are your sources looking at to determine just over the course of today, over the course of this week when we get this key economic data on inflation? Where are we going to go from here?
Yeah, Mandy, I think there's two cuts to that chart too, right? The other one would be I could look at the top and the bottom line, which tell me move more than 1% or move less than 1%. That's also over a 50% chance too, right? So in some ways, perhaps the volatility that you've seen in this market isn't going anywhere. And that I think is sort of what most strategists are saying right now. Listen, this is not maybe the dip that you buy hand over fist this morning because we feel confident that this narrative is changing right now. It is a little bit of a wait and see. You have inflation data coming out tomorrow. You have consumer sentiment data on Friday that has been moving the market over its last couple releases. So there doesn't feel like a clear catalyst where you're going to say, okay, now I know it's time to buy, right? And I think that's important for investors out there to understand too, is when you talk about quote unquote buying the dip, no one knows exactly where the dip is, right? And at some point, things just start to slowly change a little bit, and there will be some catalysts along the way. But just because we had the worst day in the stock market since 2022, at least from the NASDAQ's perspective, that doesn't mean that you just get a relief rally today and then it's over after that relief rally, right? I think some of these growth concerns that are out there are legitimate. I think the policy uncertainty is, of course, not leaving us, right? We still don't know what's happening with tariffs in a month. That conversation isn't going anywhere. So I don't think this is a we're going to leave this week with more answers than we had. We're out of peak earnings season right now, right? We're hearing from some airliners today, but you're not hearing from a lot of corporates right now either. So it's a little bit of a quiet period where we're sort of digesting, trying to figure out what's happening. Again, key inflation data tomorrow seems to probably be your next major, major catalyst.
The Honors Physics student in me would say even dead cats bounce ultimately.
That is still true. Josh, thanks so much for taking the time.