Wall Street Shows Its 'bouncebackability': McGeever
By Jamie McGeever
ORLANDO, Florida, asteroidsathome.net Feb 5 (Reuters) - "Bouncebackability."
This Britishism is usually associated with cliche-prone soccer managers trumpeting their teams' ability to react to beat. It's not likely to find its way throughout the pond into the Wall Street crowd's lexicon, but it perfectly sums up the U.S. stock market's resilience to all the obstacles, shocks and whatever else that's been thrown 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 turmoil that recently called into question America's "exceptionalism" in the worldwide AI arms race.
Any one of those concerns still has the possible to snowball, triggering an avalanche of selling that could press U.S. equities into a correction or perhaps bear-market territory.
But Wall Street has actually become remarkably durable considering that the 2022 thrashing, particularly in the last six months.
Just take a look at the synthetic intelligence-fueled chaos on Jan. 27, spurred by Chinese startup DeepSeek's discovery that it had actually established a big language model that could attain similar or fishtanklive.wiki much better outcomes than U.S.-developed LLMs at a fraction of the expense. By numerous measures, the market move was seismic.
Nvidia shares fell 17%, slicing almost $600 billion off the firm's market cap, the most significant one-day loss for any company ever. The value of the broader U.S. stock exchange fell by around $1 trillion.
Drilling deeper, analysts at JPMorgan discovered that the rout in "long momentum" - basically buying stocks that have been carrying out well just recently, such as tech and AI shares - was a near "7 sigma" relocation, or seven times the . It was the third-largest fall in 40 years for suvenir51.ru this trading method.
But this impressive move didn't crash the market. Rotation into other sectors sped up, and around 70% of S&P 500-listed stocks ended the day greater, implying the broader index fell only 1.45%. And purchasers of tech stocks soon returned.
U.S. equity funds drew in nearly $24 billion of inflows recently, technology fund inflows hit a 16-week high, wiki.lafabriquedelalogistique.fr and momentum funds brought in positive circulations for a fifth-consecutive week, according to EPFR, the fund streams 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 flows ... suggest that much of those investors 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-year low against the dollar stimulated fears that investors would be forced to offer properties in other markets and countries to cover losses in their big yen-funded carry trades.
The yen's rally was extreme, on par with past financial crises, and the Nikkei's 12% fall on Aug. 5 was the greatest one-day drop because October 1987 and the second-largest on record.
The panic, if it can be called that, spread. The S&P 500 lost 8% in two days. But it disappeared quickly. The S&P 500 recovered its losses within two weeks, mariskamast.net and the Nikkei did also within a month.
So Wall Street has passed 2 huge tests in the last 6 months, a period that consisted of the U.S. presidential election and Trump's go back to the White House.
What explains the resilience? There's no one obvious answer. Investors are broadly bullish about Trump's economic program, the Fed still seems to be in reducing mode (in the meantime), lovewiki.faith the AI craze and U.S. exceptionalism narratives are still in play, and liquidity is plentiful.
Perhaps one key motorist is a well-worn one: the Fed put. Investors - many of whom have actually spent an excellent chunk of their working lives in the age of extremely loose monetary policy - may still feel that, if it actually boils down to it, the Fed will have their backs.
There will be more pullbacks, and risks of a more extended downturn do appear to be growing. But for now, the rebounds keep coming. That's bouncebackability.
(The viewpoints expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.)
(By Jamie McGeever; Editing by Rod Nickel)