Zhitong Financial APP learned that U. S. stocks opened higher on Sept. 21, with the benchmark 500 and the Dow continuing to hit record highs. As of press time, the Dow was up 0.25% at 26723, the Nasdaq was up 0.19% at 8043, and the S & P 500 was up 0.28% at 2938.
Although US stocks continue to hit record highs, the market has a very different view of the future of US stocks.
Optimist Grant Bowers, vice president and fund manager of BEN's stock team, thinks the bull market in U. S. stocks will continue into 2019.
In terms of economic growth, the United States is bucking the trend, Grant Bowers said. Us GDP growth accelerated in 2018, reaching 4.1 per cent in the second quarter. This is the fastest growth rate in nearly four years. The growth rate is impressive, but tax cuts and higher federal spending could bring some growth forward to 2018, meaning it may be difficult to replicate in the future.
At the same time, the two pillars of the US economy are doing well. When it takes a closer look at consumption and corporate earnings as the basis of the US economy, both pillars perform well and do not show any signs of stress that the economic cycle is nearing a negative inflection point or recession.
Pessimists are like Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said the "big bull market" in the US stock market was over due to increasing uncertainty about economic growth, rising interest rates and rising debt problems.
The BofA Merrill Lynch report also showed that investors were bearish on the growth of US stocks, holding more cash and bullish on US economic decoupling (decoupling). Pessimism about the global economy is at its highest level since December 2011, according to the agency's latest survey of fund managers. 24 per cent of investors expect global growth to slow over the next 12 months, up from 7 per cent last month.
It has also been reported that although the S & P 500 remains at an all-time high and continues to rise, the amount of money flowing into US securities funds has shrunk. The last such divergence was observed in 2015 / 16, when there were two corrections in the stock market. If you take a closer look at the changes in the flow of money into different types of US funds, it is not difficult to see that money continues to flow into defensive assets such as bond funds and continues to flow out of equity funds, which means that recent investors are actually risk-averse.