Dreary headlines wash over investors every day – war in Ukraine, inflation, the unending spread of COVID-19, supply-chain troubles. All the gloom has market analysts downgrading prospects for US growth and predicting a recession.
A: If you ask the average investor, my guess is that they would say it doesn’t feel super good to be invested in the market this year. It’s not as fun as it has been for the last decade, let’s say, or even those few months post-COVID where everything just started going straight up and all of our trading accounts looked great, we all looked like geniuses. And now, the market just has a lot of headwinds. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the market right now.
A: If a lot of the topics I just discussed were to go in a different place – for example, if the Fed hikes more aggressively and doesn’t feel satisfied with inflation falling, and you start to see a hard landing – then I do think that some of that will start feeding into the market. Banks are in good shape – this isn’t 2008, right? Credit is in pretty good shape, the consumer is in good shape, the debt-servicing ratios are stronger than they’ve been in decades.
It’s important to classify what type of trader you are, too. So if you’re looking for short-term returns, I think that’s trickier. The machines and high-frequency guys do a great job with that, but the average investor that was doing well with day-trading over the past year, it becomes a little more dangerous just because you do have so much range-bound volatility.