The tech-heavy Nasdaq and broader S&P 500 are setting records after records.
Three experts joined CNBC to discuss where markets are headed next.
Mike Wilson, chief U.S. equity strategist at Morgan Stanley, says expectations may have been too lofty and a market cooldown could be healthy.
“We’ve seen consumer confidence … suggesting the consumer is fading a bit — not a recession but the consumer is tired — and that’s been our thesis all along. Is there’s going to be a payback here on demand? Overnight, our economics team actually lowered their GDP forecasts from 6.5% to 2.9% for the third quarter. They’ve kept their fourth-quarter number the same, but look, there’s risk to that probably if delta doesn’t fade or my view is that delta is a bit of a trap. People are saying, ‘Oh, the slowdown is due to delta.’ The slowdown is not due to delta exclusively. What it is due to is the fact that we overshot on the upside, we had monster stimulus and now we’re going to have some payback and that’s OK.”
Jeremy Siegel, professor of finance at the Wharton School, says the momentum trade is in full swing.
“I think we’re still in a bull market. I think long-term returns are not going to be as robust as they’ve been certainly over the last 10 years and maybe not even over the last 200 years, but still far ahead of inflation and way, way ahead of fixed income. Right now what’s going on is you’ve heard of this old expression on Wall Street ‘up a staircase and down an elevator.’ We’re going up the staircase. I don’t know when the elevator is going to come. But it looks like a momentum trade in the sense that it just keeps on going up a little bit every day, no real news to propel it. And a lot of momentum players piling on. We’ve had this before. And, you know, it’s very hard to say when it might end.”
Tom Forte, senior research analyst at D.A. Davidson, discusses one critical issue for the largest publicly traded company on Wall Street — Apple.
“My thesis is that over time that 30% commission that Apple collects from the App Store to decline to a lower number such as 10%. I think maybe the hope from some investors is that if Apple can make these adjustments on its own, it won’t require the government to step in and maybe come up with a more onerous solution for Apple. But I do think it’s curious that investors are giving the stock a pass on that important development.”
