After Strong Quarter, Where Is Wall Street Headed Next?
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How did U.S. stocks perform in Q2 after the pandemic-driven crash?
Here's your Monday briefing for Wednesday, July 1st. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. If you've been following the markets during the pandemic, you've probably felt like buckling your seatbelt. U.S. stock markets lost a third of their value in March and April, then turned around and had their best quarterly performance in more than 20 years. Along the way, there have been thousand-point daily gains and losses. All that's to say, if you're thinking of investing, proceed with caution.
Trying to react to the market by trying to time it is a loser's game. And it's a loser's game because the statistics show, stats show that people, on average, don't get it right.
But what if you got retirement savings tied up in the market? And how has the coronavirus changed the face of investing? Saker Nusebe, CEO of investment manager Federated Hermes International, will join us with some insight after the break.
U.S.
Why does Saker Nusseibeh say markets struggled to react at the pandemic's start?
stock markets have largely rebounded since the start of the pandemic, but what can we expect on Wall Street for the third quarter and beyond? Sacher Nusebe, CEO of Federated Hermes International, joins us to discuss. So, Sacher, four months into the pandemic's grip on the economy, Can we identify any kind of a pattern as to how the markets respond?
For many years, the market was used to reacting to what it saw as financial crises, be that 2000, 2008. And therefore, it had a playbook from which it could essentially draw upon to try to react. The problem it had with the coronavirus is that for the first time it was dealing with what effectively is a societal crisis that has ramifications on the economy and therefore the markets, and was completely, in a sense, unequipped or ill-equipped to understand how it can react to it. And it finally got its act together when it started to figure out, well, whatever's happening out there, what matters is what kind of recovery we're going to have from what kind of recession. and therefore the discussion became how deep the recession, how quick the recovery.
The way it discounted the recovery, to my mind, right at the end, was rational in that it said that whatever destruction to economic activity we're seeing is temporary in the sense that no real infrastructure is being destroyed, and although it might result in unemployment, we assume this will pick up again once the economy gets back on track. So that recovery was perfectly logical and sensible. Now, with the resurgence of corona infection cases in some parts of the United States and indeed in other parts of the world where we've seen a clampdown on it, the market is getting a little bit worried about whether the recovery is going to be further out because it's going to take longer because you might have more lockdown.
I don't think that's going to be the case, but I think that's how the market is reacting to it. So I think finally the market is reacting rationally. So what does that tell you about what the market is likely to do in the third quarter? I find it very difficult to try to suggest a trend line which is that short a term. And the reason is we don't know how this disease is behaving and therefore we might have volatility. What I can say is in the long term, and despite people worrying about the valuation of the market, in the long term, unless you believe this crisis is resulting in a real destruction of the economy, and that does not mean unemployment or some companies going bust, and a real remover of worker capability, meaning people no longer are around to work, you have to assume that whatever hit we're going to get is a temporary hit, which is removed after time.
So in general, I would say that I'm positive on markets. I'm positive even on the U.S. market, despite the valuation that we saw, because the U.S. economy is still a strong engine. And actually, I'm very constructive on the U.S. recovery. I would say what we say at Federated Hermes anyway is the only way to invest is for the long term. And for the long term, I'd put money into the market.
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