Wall Street Shows Its 'bouncebackability': McGeever
By Jamie McGeever
ORLANDO, Florida, Feb 5 (Reuters) - "Bouncebackability."
This Britishism is generally connected with cliche-prone soccer supervisors trumpeting their groups' ability to react to beat. It's not likely to discover its way across the pond into the Wall Street crowd's lexicon, but it completely summarizes the U.S. stock market's strength to all the problems, shocks and everything else that's been thrown at it just recently.
And there have actually been a lot: U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff flip-flops, stretched appraisals, extreme concentration in Big Tech and the DeepSeek-led chaos that recently cast doubt on America's "exceptionalism" in the global AI arms race.
Any among those problems still has the potential to snowball, causing an avalanche of selling that might press U.S. equities into a correction or perhaps bear-market area.
But Wall Street has ended up being incredibly durable because the 2022 thrashing, especially in the last six months.
Just look at the synthetic on Jan. 27, spurred by Chinese start-up DeepSeek's revelation that it had developed a large language design that might attain comparable or better outcomes than U.S.-developed LLMs at a fraction of the expense. By numerous measures, the marketplace move was seismic.
Nvidia shares fell 17%, slicing almost $600 billion off the firm's market cap, the biggest one-day loss for any company ever. The worth of the larger U.S. stock exchange fell by around $1 trillion.
Drilling deeper, analysts at JPMorgan discovered that the rout in "long momentum" - essentially buying stocks that have actually been performing well recently, such as tech and AI shares - was a near "7 sigma" relocation, or fishtanklive.wiki seven times the standard discrepancy. It was the third-largest fall in 40 years for this trading strategy.
But this legendary move didn't crash the marketplace. Rotation into other sectors sped up, and forum.batman.gainedge.org around 70% of S&P 500-listed stocks ended the day greater, suggesting the more comprehensive index fell just 1.45%. And purchasers of tech stocks quickly returned.
U.S. equity funds brought in nearly $24 billion of inflows recently, innovation fund inflows struck a 16-week high, and momentum funds brought in positive flows 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 Cameron Brandt wrote on Monday. "Fund flows ... recommend that a number of those investors kept faith with their previous presumptions 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 triggered worries that investors would be forced to offer possessions in other markets and nations to cover losses in their huge yen-funded carry trades.
The yen's rally was severe, on par with past financial crises, and the Nikkei's 12% fall on Aug. 5 was the most significant one-day drop since October 1987 and the second-largest on record.
The panic, if it can be called that, spread. The S&P 500 lost 8% in 2 days. But it disappeared quickly. The S&P 500 recovered its losses within two weeks, and the Nikkei did likewise within a month.
So Wall Street has passed 2 big tests in the last six months, a period that included the U.S. presidential election and Trump's return to the White House.
What explains the strength? There's nobody obvious answer. Investors are broadly bullish about Trump's financial agenda, the Fed still appears to be in reducing mode (for now), the AI craze and U.S. exceptionalism stories are still in play, and liquidity is numerous.
Perhaps one crucial driver is a well-worn one: the Fed put. Investors - a lot of whom have invested an excellent portion of their working lives in the period 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 dangers of a more extended decline do seem to be growing. But for now, the rebounds keep coming. That's bouncebackability.
(The viewpoints revealed here are those of the author, a writer for Reuters.)
(By Jamie McGeever; Editing by Rod Nickel)