Wall Street Shows Its 'bouncebackability': McGeever
By Jamie McGeever
ORLANDO, Florida, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr Feb 5 (Reuters) - "Bouncebackability."
This Britishism is normally connected with cliche-prone soccer supervisors trumpeting their groups' capability to react to beat. It's not likely to discover its way across the pond into the Wall Street crowd's lexicon, but it perfectly sums up the U.S. stock exchange's strength to all the problems, shocks and everything else that's been tossed at it just recently.
And there have been a lot: U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff flip-flops, stretched appraisals, severe concentration in Big Tech and the DeepSeek-led chaos that recently called into question America's "exceptionalism" in the international AI arms race.
Any one of those issues still has the possible to snowball, triggering an avalanche of selling that might push U.S. equities into a correction or perhaps bear-market area.
But Wall Street has become remarkably resilient because the 2022 thrashing, specifically in the last 6 months.
Just look at the synthetic intelligence-fueled turmoil on Jan. 27, stimulated by Chinese startup DeepSeek's revelation that it had established a large language model that could attain similar or much better outcomes than U.S.-developed LLMs at a fraction of the cost. By numerous measures, the market relocation was seismic.
Nvidia shares fell 17%, slicing nearly $600 billion off the firm's market cap, the greatest one-day loss for any business ever. The worth of the broader U.S. stock exchange fell by around $1 trillion.
Drilling much deeper, analysts at JPMorgan discovered that the thrashing in "long momentum" - basically purchasing stocks that have been carrying out well just recently, such as tech and AI shares - was a near "7 sigma" move, or seven times the standard variance. It was the third-largest fall in 40 years for this trading strategy.
But this impressive move didn't crash the marketplace. Rotation into other sectors sped up, and around 70% of S&P 500-listed stocks ended the day higher, suggesting the broader index fell only 1.45%. And purchasers of tech stocks quickly returned.
U.S. equity funds brought in nearly $24 billion of inflows last week, innovation fund inflows struck a 16-week high, and momentum funds brought in favorable circulations for a fifth-consecutive week, according to EPFR, the fund flows tracking firm.
"Investors saw the DeepSeek-triggered selloff as an opportunity instead of an off-ramp," EPFR director of research study Cameron Brandt wrote on Monday. "Fund streams ... suggest that a number of those financiers kept faith with their previous assumptions about AI."
PANIC MODE?
Remember "yenmageddon," the yen bring trade volatility of last August? The yen's sudden bounce from a 33 against the dollar stimulated fears that investors would be forced to sell properties in other markets and countries to cover losses in their huge yen-funded bring trades.
The yen's rally was extreme, on par with previous financial crises, and the Nikkei's 12% fall on Aug. 5 was the biggest one-day drop since October 1987 and the second-largest on record.
The panic, if it can be called that, spread. The S&P 500 lost 8% in 2 days. But it vanished quickly. The S&P 500 recouped its losses within 2 weeks, and the Nikkei did also within a month.
So Wall Street has passed 2 big tests in the last six months, a duration that consisted of the U.S. governmental election and Trump's go back to the White House.
What explains the strength? There's no one obvious answer. Investors are broadly bullish about Trump's economic agenda, the Fed still seems to be in reducing mode (for now), the AI frenzy and U.S. exceptionalism narratives are still in play, and liquidity abounds.
Perhaps one essential motorist is a well-worn one: the Fed put. Investors - a number of whom have spent a good chunk of their working lives in the period of extraordinarily loose financial policy - might still feel that, if it really comes down to it, the Fed will have their backs.
There will be more pullbacks, and threats of a more prolonged downturn do appear to be growing. But for now, forum.batman.gainedge.org the rebounds keep coming. That's bouncebackability.
(The opinions revealed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.)
(By Jamie McGeever; Editing by Rod Nickel)