One chief investment officer says he thinks equity markets are showing some signs that a bottom has been reached following Monday’s volatile trading day.
Stocks saw some relief Tuesday with the S&P/TSX Composite Index, S&P 500 Index, Nasdaq Composite Index and Dow Jones Industrial Average all seeing gains during late morning trading.
Purpose Investments CIO Greg Taylor said in an interview with BNN Bloomberg that investors should look for signs of capitulation, and it “feels like” markets showed some of that during Friday’s trading session, characterising it as “one of the worst days we’ve seen a while.”
As futures markets broadly declined on Sunday night, he said it might have reminded some traders of the global financial crisis.
“But it is healthy to see the signs of a reversal that we got yesterday during the day because we had that big, big down open, we had the VIX spike over 60 and then slowly throughout the day buying came back in,” Taylor said.
“Headlines were still going out there and markets weren’t buying them and not paying attention to them. And I think that’s kind of a sign that the sellers are done, the sentiments washed out, and you’re starting to see people come back to the market and say maybe we got a little too crazy with all this news here and got carried away and now we’re resetting.”
He added that it looks like markets are likely to be choppy for a while, despite Tuesday’s bounce back.
Going forward, there are questions regarding how long U.S. President Donald Trump will keep tariffs in place, which are expected to weigh on economic growth and raise prices for U.S. consumers, the Associated Press reported. If tariffs remain, recession fears among investors and economists will still be in place.
Going into earnings season for companies reporting first quarter results, Taylor said firms are facing uncertainty.
“We’re heading into earnings season, which is going to be one of the most uncertain earnings seasons that I think we’ve had in a while, and this is going to be the big thing holding back the markets because when you talk to management teams, they don’t really know what to say,” he said.
Taylor added management teams don’t know how long tariffs will be in place and what effect they could have on business models.
“So, markets hate uncertainty is one of the classic rules, and we’ve got a lot of uncertainty out there and I don’t think much of that’s going to be cleared up through the earning season as it’s going to be incredibly hard for companies to give guidance,” he said.
