S&P 500 Has Already Bottomed, No Hard Landing: Yardeni

Ahead of the Federal Reserve meeting and Big Tech earnings later this week, Ed Yardeni has some words of comfort: the worst has passed for this bear market.

In the view of the Yardeni Research president, the S&P 500’s plunge last month to a 3,666.77 low likely marked the trough of the 2022 equity rout.

Underpinning the sanguine call is the resilience in corporate earnings and the still-healthy outlook for consumers and businesses even as the economy slows.

“It’s never easy to pick a bottom in the stock market, but I’m going to give it a try,” Yardeni said on Bloomberg TV. “The real question is going to be the earnings season, and so far the earnings season is going reasonably well. It has not really thrashed the stock market, and the stock market’s held up quite well.”

The statement is a large one ahead of a decisive week — the Fed looks all set for another supersized interest-rate hike on Wednesday, while most mega-cap technology companies, including Alphabet Inc, Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft Corp and Meta Platforms Inc, will release their earnings reports.

Yardeni appears to be in the minority.

In Bank of America Corp.’s survey this month, money managers said they’ve cut their equity exposure to the lowest level since the 2008 financial crisis, a sign of no faith in recent market bounce.

At the end of June, a Deutsche Bank AG poll showed 72% of respondents expected the S&P 500 to fall to 3,300 first, rather than rallying to 4,500.