2018 Bull Market All About the Earnings, Analyst Says
*By Michael Teich*
U.S. stocks are just days away from recording their longest bull run in history, with Monday's gains putting the S&P 325 percent above its lows during the financial crisis.
And while M&A provided the latest market boost, JPMorgan ETF's global market strategist Samantha Azzarello said long-term stock appreciation will be buoyed by strong corporate earnings for the rest of the year.
"Really what's been supporting the market this year is earnings growth to the tune of 22 percent. This has really been an earnings story for 2018," Azzarello said Monday in an interview on Cheddar.
Azzarello added the earnings growth will continue to be fueled by last year's tax cuts.
Stocks got a boost early Monday on the [news](https://cheddar.com/videos/pepsico-to-buy-sodastream-in-3-2-billion-deal) that Pepsi is acquiring SodaStream for $3.2 billion and Tyson Foods is snapping up Keystone Foods for $2.16 billion.
And unless there's a major turn around in the coming days, the current bull market will turn 3,453 days old on Wednesday, [surpassing](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/14/this-could-be-the-longest-bull-market-in-stocks-ever-and-it-still-has-.html) its old record ー October 1990 thru March 2000 ー by one day. Still its gains over that period do still lag the 417 percent returns notched during the dotcom boom.
Still, while recent geopolitical tensions with Turkey have weighed on stocks this month, Azzarello said investors may be overreacting to the headlines.
"They'll calm down," she said. "The main thing has been on European banks. But you look at that, and European bank exposure to Turkey is less than 4 percent ー that's the highest for Spain, and it's less for 2 percent for the rest. The main part of the market that should be impacted really isn't that much."
But the real focus for the markets should lie elsewhere, said Azzarello.
"We've been looking at Chinese tech. That's larger than Turkey's impact on all of this. The market's a bit misguided."
Shares of high-fliers like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent are all down 15 percent or more since their highs of the year.
For full interview [click here] ( https://cheddar.com/videos/the-market-is-misguided-says-jpmorgan-strategist).
An independent watchdog within the IRS reports that while taxpayer services have vastly improved, the agency is still too slow to resolve identity theft cases. And National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins says those delays are “unconscionable.” Erin M. Collins said in the report released Wednesday that overall the 2024 filing season went smoothly, though IRS delays in resolving identity theft victim assistance cases are worsening. It took nearly 19 months to resolve self-reported identity theft cases as of January, and Wednesday's report states that now it takes 22 months to resolve these cases.
Amazon.com Inc. surpassed $2 trillion in market value for the first time in afternoon trading on Wednesday. The push higher for Amazon’s stock market valuation comes a little more than a week after Nvidia hit $3 trillion and briefly became the most valuable company on Wall Street. Nvidia’s chips are used to power many AI application and its valuation has soared as a result. Amazon has also been making big investments in AI as global interest has grown in the technology. Most of the company’s focus has been on business-focused products.
Climate change doesn’t just mean more extreme weather – it also leads to billions of dollars in lost productivity, tourism, and stresses infrastructure.
It’s an annual tradition: the Fed’s banking ‘stress test.’ A year after the regional banking crisis, there are good reasons to make sure they’re prepped.
Summer is upon us, which means weddings, trips overseas, and trips to see Taylor Swift. Avoid a “Cruel Summer” with these budget-friendly tips and tricks.
While Nvidia's meteoric rise led it to briefly dethrone Microsoft as the world's biggest public company, there's a lot more going on in this market than A.I.
