On the day before this year's Independence Day in the US, a "thunderbolt" came from Wall Street — the top analyst who persisted in shouting "bearish" during the past year and a half of the US stock market's continuous rise, sadly left his stage.
According to media reports citing internal memos, Marko Kolanovic, chief market strategist and joint global research director at JPMorgan, has entered the process of leaving his post to "explore other opportunities."
With Kolanovic's departure, Dubravko Lakos, global stock macro strategy director, will take over as global chief strategist, while Hussein Malik will serve as global research director alone. At the same time, Stephen Dulake, global credit product research director at JPMorgan, will lead a newly formed fundamental research team with Nick Rosato, North American equity research director.
Returning to the topic at hand, readers who follow US stock news are certainly very familiar with Kolanovic's name. Because as one after another well-known research director on Wall Street went bullish, the strong bearish argument on the US stock market was almost entirely monopolized by him.
Kolanovic rose to fame during the COVID-19 pandemic and became a well-known "contrarian indicator."
After receiving a PhD in theoretical physics from New York University in 2003, Kolanovic entered Wall Street. He worked as a quantitative analyst at Merrill Lynch for two years, and then in 2005 he jumped to Bear Stearns as director of global equity linked research.
After the subprime crisis broke out, JPMorgan took over Bear Stearns. So it is not technically a problem that Kolanovic has served at JPMorgan for 19 years, as some media outlets have said.
Kolanovic's career highlights occurred in 2020. In March of that year, he accurately predicted that the US stock market was about to experience a strong rebound near the market's low point. As a result, the S&P 500 index, which hit its lowest point at 2,191.86 points in March, rose to new highs of 3,700 points by the end of the year.
Since then, Kolanovic has become an American "self-made millionaire" and a regular on the annual Institutional Investor Magazine's Best Analysts list. He was later promoted to chief market strategist at JPMorgan in 2021.
It was then that Kolanovic put on two years of "performances"— first, insisting on bullish views during the continuous decline of the S&P 500 index in 2022, and then suddenly turning bullish when the stock index approached its annual low at the end of the year. He has maintained bearish views throughout the rising period of the US stock market since 2023 until now.
According to public reports, Kolanovic continues to hold the view that the S&P 500 index will fall to 4200 points by year-end in the half-year outlook report released last week. Judging from the current index rise above 5500 points, Kolanovic's prediction is equivalent to the S&P falling by at least 20% by the end of the year. He emphasized that "there is an obvious disconnection between the significant rise in US stock valuations and the economic cycle."
Therefore, as other major banks and analysts such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Bank of America steadily raise their expectations for the US stock market, JPMorgan has kept the most bearish position on the entire Wall Street. So whether Dubravko Lakos will change his stance after taking over the strategy team will be the next focus of the market's attention.
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