00:00 Speaker A
It’s time now for our call of the day. Wall Street growing increasingly bullish on its full-year outlook for the S&P 500 amid a massive rally for the benchmark index over the past two months. RBC capital markets, the latest firm to boost their S&P 500 target, RBC’s head of US equity strategy, Lori Calvasina, writing in a note to clients on Sunday, they’ve raised their year-end target to 6,250 from a prior target of 5,730 with a target reflecting a roughly flat return for the rest of the year. Calvasina writes she feels neutral on equities. Now you can see on your screen here, RBC is one of nine firms now that have raised their S&P 500 target over the last several months amid this massive rally that we’ve seen in the market, but really what Calvasina is sort of expressing here, they think that the rally might be perhaps overextended at this point or at least see a little bit of chop. Ed Yardney of Yardney Research, who’s also on our chart there at 6,500, pointed out that it’s been a V-shaped recovery for stocks since April, but he wrote in a note to clients on Sunday, even his path to 6,500 doesn’t look very linear right now. Yardney noted that instead of a V-shape, we might start turning into a little bit of a square root shape here where stocks have come all the way back up and maybe we go flat for a little bit. Key right now of what strategists are watching is essentially the tariff back and forth. Someone like Yardney had expected the tariff back and forth or the quote Trump tariff turmoil, as he calls it, to be over by now. But we’re in the middle of July, we now have an August 1st deadline coming, and it remains unclear exactly when this is going to be solved. So for now, perhaps maybe wait and see and a little bit of chop with the market near record highs.